Search results for "Pitch Discrimination"

Event-Related Potentials and Autonomic Responses to a Change in Unattended Auditory Stimuli

1992

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and autonomic nervous system (ANS) responses to occasional pitch and rise-time changes in a task-irrelevant auditory stimulus repeating at short intervals were measured while the subject performed a difficult intellectual task (Raven Matrices). It was found that deviant stimuli elicited the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the ERP even when they elicited no ANS response. There was no significant difference in the mismatch negativity between trials in which the skin conductance response was or was not elicited. The pitch deviant tone also elicited heart rate deceleration, whereas the rise-time deviant tone tended to elicit a later heart rate accele…

Processing of Musical Syntax Tonic versus Subdominant: An Event-related Potential Study

2006

Abstract The present study investigates the effect of a change in syntactic-like musical function on event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Eight-chord piano sequences were presented to musically expert and novice listeners. Instructed to watch a movie and to ignore the musical sequences, the participants had to react when a chord was played with a different instrument than the piano. Participants were not informed that the relevant manipulation was the musical function of the last chord (target) of the sequences. The target chord acted either as a syntactically stable tonic chord (i.e., a C major chord in the key of C major) or as a less syntactically stable subdominant chord (i.e., a C ma…

Sequential grouping modulates the effect of non-simultaneous masking on auditory intensity resolution.

2012

The presence of non-simultaneous maskers can result in strong impairment in auditory intensity resolution relative to a condition without maskers, and causes a complex pattern of effects that is difficult to explain on the basis of peripheral processing. We suggest that the failure of selective attention to the target tones is a useful framework for understanding these effects. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that the sequential grouping of the targets and the maskers into separate auditory objects facilitates selective attention and therefore reduces the masker-induced impairment in intensity resolution. In Experiment 1, a condition favoring the processing of the maskers and the targ…

Primary motor area contribution to attentional reorienting after distraction

2008

The anatomical structures involved in distraction-related processing in the auditory domain were investigated using magnetoencephalography. Participants performed a duration-discrimination task on a sequence of 200 and 400 ms long tones. Infrequent (12%) task-irrelevant pitch changes resulted in slower discriminative responses and more errors. Event-related potentials to these changes show an increased N1, a mismatch negativity, a P3a, and a reorienting negativity. The event-related magnetic fields revealed focal activities in superior and medial temporal areas in the N1/mismatch negativity time range. No significant activity was found in the P3a interval. In the reorienting negativity inte…

Anxiety, Stress, and Contingent Negative Variation Reconsidered

1984

Neural discrimination of nonprototypical chords in music experts and laymen:an MEG study

2009

Abstract At the level of the auditory cortex, musicians discriminate pitch changes more accurately than nonmusicians. However, it is not agreed upon how sound familiarity and musical expertise interact in the formation of pitch-change discrimination skills, that is, whether musicians possess musical pitch discrimination abilities that are generally more accurate than in nonmusicians or, alternatively, whether they may be distinguished from nonmusicians particularly with respect to the discrimination of nonprototypical sounds that do not play a reference role in Western tonal music. To resolve this, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure the change-related magnetic mismatch response…

Latencies of the P300 component of the auditory event-related potential in depression are related to the Bech-Rafaelsen Melancholia Scale but not to …

1991

The relationship between severity of depression and the P300 latency of auditory event-related potential was investigated in 36 patients with a major depressive episode according to DSM-III. Positive correlations were found between of the P300 latency and the total score of the Bech-Rafaelsen Melancholia Scale (BRMS), the 4 retardation items of the BRMS (motor, verbal, intellectual and emotional) and the item for lowered mood. In contrast, latencies were not associated with the scores of the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, which considers retardation to a lesser extent than the BRMS.

An automatic test for frequency discrimination

1987

Békésy audiometry has been applied to the determination of the frequency discrimination threshold. The automatic test for frequency discrimination is performed by means of a modified automatic audiometer at fixed frequencies, each administered for a duration of 60 s. The test involves the stimulus of a series of pairs of tone bursts of 500 ms duration: the frequency of one of the tone bursts (f0) is constant, while the other (f0 + delta f) gradually increases and decreases according to the subject's response. The tracings obtained facilitate the evaluation of the discrimination capability of the subject. The pattern obtained from a sample of normally hearing people was analysed in order to …

Auditory cortical event-related potentials to pitch deviances in rats

1998

Abstract We recorded epidural event-related potentials (ERPs) from the auditory cortex in anesthetized rats when pitch-deviant tones were presented in a homogenous series of standard tones (oddball condition). Additionally, deviant tones were presented without standard tones (deviant-alone condition). ERPs to deviant tones in the oddball condition differed significantly from ERPs to standard tones at the latency range of 63–243 ms. On the other hand, ERPs to deviant tones in the deviant-alone condition did not differ from ERPs to standard tones until 196 ms from stimulus onset. The results suggest that oddball stimuli can be neurophysiologically discriminated in anesthetized rats. Furthermo…

Electron microscopic localization of nitric oxide I synthase in the organ of Corti of the guinea pig

1997

Nitric oxide synthase (NOS) activity has been detected previously in the mammalian cochlea at a light microscopic level. Here we present results of electron microscopic analysis for post-embedding immunoreactivity of neural-type NOS I in the cochlea of the guinea pig. Strong enzyme immunoreactivity was identified in the cytoplasm of inner and outer hair cells. Gold-labeled NOS I antibodies were mainly located in electron-dense areas of the cytoplasm, whereas electron-lucent regions of the receptor cells were nearly free from any immunoreactivity. In both types of hair cells anti-NOS I antibodies were also visible in the cuticular plates, hair bundles and nuclei. Further ultrastructural anal…