Is Hey Jude in the right key? Cognitive components of absolute pitch memory.

Most individuals, regardless of formal musical training, have long-term absolute pitch memory (APM) for familiar musical recordings, though with varying levels of accuracy. The present study followed up on recent evidence suggesting an association between singing accuracy and APM (Halpern & Pfordresher, 2022, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 84(1), 260-269), as well as tonal short-term memory (STM) and APM (Van Hedger et al., 2018, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71(4), 879-891). Participants from three research sites (n = 108) completed a battery of tasks including APM, tonal STM, singing accuracy, and self-reported auditory imagery. Both tonal STM and singing accuracy predicted APM, replicating prior results. Tonal STM also predicted singing accuracy, music training, and auditory imagery. Further tests suggested that the association between APM and singing accuracy was fully mediated by tonal STM. This pattern comports well with models of vocal pitch matching that include STM for pitch as a mechanism for sensorimotor translation.

Absolute pitch judgments of familiar melodies generalize across timbre and octave.

Most listeners can determine when a familiar recording of music has been shifted in musical key by as little as one semitone (e.g., from B to C major). These findings appear to suggest that absolute pitch memory is widespread in the general population. However, the use of familiar recordings makes it unclear whether these findings genuinely reflect absolute melody-key associations for at least two reasons. First, listeners may be able to use spectral cues from the familiar instrumentation of the recordings to determine when a familiar recording has been shifted in pitch. Second, listeners may be able to rely solely on pitch height cues (e.g., relying on a feeling that an incorrect recording sounds "too high" or "too low"). Neither of these strategies would require an understanding of pitch chroma or musical key. The present experiments thus assessed whether listeners could make accurate absolute melody-key judgments when listening to novel versions of these melodies, differing from the iconic recording in timbre (Experiment 1) or timbre and octave (Experiment 2). Listeners in both experiments were able to select the correct-key version of the familiar melody at rates that were well above chance. These results fit within a growing body of research supporting the idea that most listeners, regardless of formal musical training, have robust representations of absolute pitch - based on pitch chroma - that generalize to novel listening situations. Implications for theories of auditory pitch memory are discussed.

Going Beyond Rote Auditory Learning: Neural Patterns of Generalized Auditory Learning.

The ability to generalize across specific experiences is vital for the recognition of new patterns, especially in speech perception considering acoustic-phonetic pattern variability. Indeed, behavioral research has demonstrated that listeners are able via a process of generalized learning to leverage their experiences of past words said by difficult-to-understand talker to improve their understanding for new words said by that talker. Here, we examine differences in neural responses to generalized versus rote learning in auditory cortical processing by training listeners to understand a novel synthetic talker. Using a pretest-posttest design with EEG, participants were trained using either (1) a large inventory of words where no words were repeated across the experiment (generalized learning) or (2) a small inventory of words where words were repeated (rote learning). Analysis of long-latency auditory evoked potentials at pretest and posttest revealed that rote and generalized learning both produced rapid changes in auditory processing, yet the nature of these changes differed. Generalized learning was marked by an amplitude reduction in the N1-P2 complex and by the presence of a late negativity wave in the auditory evoked potential following training; rote learning was marked only by temporally later scalp topography differences. The early N1-P2 change, found only for generalized learning, is consistent with an active processing account of speech perception, which proposes that the ability to rapidly adjust to the specific vocal characteristics of a new talker (for which rote learning is rare) relies on attentional mechanisms to selectively modify early auditory processing sensitivity.

Clinicians' delirium treatment practice, practice change, and influences: A national online survey.

BACKGROUND: Recent studies cast doubt on the net effect of antipsychotics for delirium. AIM: To investigate the influence of these studies and other factors on clinicians' delirium treatment practice and practice change in palliative care and other specialties using the Theoretical Domains Framework. DESIGN: Australia-wide online survey of relevant clinicians. SETTING/PARTICIPANTS: Registered nurses (72%), doctors (16%), nurse practitioners (6%) and pharmacists (5%) who cared for patients with delirium in diverse settings, recruited through health professionals' organisations. RESULTS: Most of the sample (n = 475): worked in geriatrics/aged (31%) or palliative care (30%); in hospitals (64%); and saw a new patient with delirium at least weekly (61%). More (59%) reported delirium practice change since 2016, mostly by increased non-pharmacological interventions (53%). Fifty-five percent reported current antipsychotic use for delirium, primarily for patient distress (79%) and unsafe behaviour (67%). Common Theoretical Domains Framework categories of influences on respondents' delirium practice were: emotion (54%); knowledge (53%) and physical (43%) and social (21%) opportunities. Palliative care respondents more often reported: awareness of any named key study of antipsychotics for delirium (73% vs 39%, p < 0.001); changed delirium treatment (73% vs 53%, p = 0.017); decreased pharmacological interventions (60% vs 15%, p < 0.001); off-label medication use (86% vs 51%, p < 0.001: antipsychotics 79% vs 44%, p < 0.001; benzodiazepines 61% vs 26%, p < 0.001) and emotion as an influence (82% vs 39%, p < 0.001). CONCLUSION: Clinicians' use of antipsychotic during delirium remains common and is primarily motivated by distress and safety concerns for the patient and others nearby. Supporting clinicians to achieve evidence-based delirium practice requires further work.

The effects of acoustic variability on absolute pitch categorization: Evidence of contextual tuning.

Absolute pitch (AP) is defined as the ability to label a musical note without the aid of a reference note. Despite the large amounts of acoustic variability encountered in music, AP listeners generally experience perceptual constancy for different exemplars within note categories (e.g., recognizing that a C played on a tuba belongs to the same category as a C played on a piccolo). The present studies investigate whether AP possessors are sensitive to context variability along acoustic dimensions that are not inherently linked to the typical definition of a note category. In a speeded target recognition task, AP participants heard a sequence of notes and pressed a button whenever they heard a designated target note. Within a trial the sequence of notes was either blocked according to note-irrelevant variation or contained a mix of different instruments (Experiment 1), amplitude levels (Experiment 2), or octaves (Experiment 3). Compared to the blocked trials, participants were significantly slower to respond in the mixed-instrument and mixed-octave trials, but not the mixed-amplitude trials. Importantly, this performance difference could not be solely attributed to initial performance differences between instruments, amplitudes, or octaves. These results suggest that AP note identification is contextually sensitive.

Of words and whistles: Statistical learning operates similarly for identical sounds perceived as speech and non-speech.

Statistical learning is an ability that allows individuals to effortlessly extract patterns from the environment, such as sound patterns in speech. Some prior evidence suggests that statistical learning operates more robustly for speech compared to non-speech stimuli, supporting the idea that humans are predisposed to learn language. However, any apparent statistical learning advantage for speech could be driven by signal acoustics, rather than the subjective perception per se of sounds as speech. To resolve this issue, the current study assessed whether there is a statistical learning advantage for ambiguous sounds that are subjectively perceived as speech-like compared to the same sounds perceived as non-speech, thereby controlling for acoustic features. We first induced participants to perceive sine-wave speech (SWS)-a degraded form of speech not immediately perceptible as speech-as either speech or non-speech. After this induction phase, participants were exposed to a continuous stream of repeating trisyllabic nonsense words, composed of SWS syllables, and then completed an explicit familiarity rating task and an implicit target detection task to assess learning. Critically, participants showed robust and equivalent performance on both measures, regardless of their subjective speech perception. In contrast, participants who perceived the SWS syllables as more speech-like showed better detection of individual syllables embedded in speech streams. These results suggest that speech perception facilitates processing of individual sounds, but not the ability to extract patterns across sounds. Our findings suggest that statistical learning is not influenced by the perceived linguistic relevance of sounds, and that it may be conceptualized largely as an automatic, stimulus-driven mechanism.

Absolute pitch may not be so absolute.

Most people cannot name the musical note that corresponds to a particular pitch without being provided a reference note, but those people with absolute pitch (AP) can do this accurately. Early experience during a developmental period is often thought to convey identity and stability of the note categories in people with AP, but the plasticity of these categories has not been investigated. Here we provide the first evidence that the note categories of adults with AP can change with listening experience. Participants with AP showed shifts in perception in direct accord with prior exposure to music detuned by a fraction of a semitone. This suggests that the apparent stability of AP categories is conferred not by early experience but rather by the cultural norms adopted for tuning music.

Learning words without trying: Daily second language podcasts support word-form learning in adults.

Spoken language contains overlapping patterns across different levels, from syllables to words to phrases. The discovery of these structures may be partially supported by statistical learning (SL), the unguided, automatic extraction of regularities from the environment through passive exposure. SL supports word learning in artificial language experiments, but few studies have examined whether it scales up to support natural language learning in adult second language learners. Here, adult English speakers (n = 70) listened to daily podcasts in either Italian or English for 2 weeks while going about their normal routines. To measure word knowledge, participants provided familiarity ratings of Italian words and nonwords both before and after the listening period. Critically, compared with English controls, Italian listeners significantly improved in their ability to discriminate Italian words and nonwords. These results suggest that unguided exposure to natural, foreign language speech supports the extraction of relevant word features and the development of nascent word forms. At a theoretical level, these findings indicate that SL may effectively scale up to support real-world language acquisition. These results also have important practical implications, suggesting that adult learners may be able to acquire relevant speech patterns and initial word forms simply by listening to the language. This form of learning can occur without explicit effort, formal instruction or focused study.

Generalizing across tonal context, timbre, and octave in rapid absolute pitch training.

Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability to name any musical note without the use of a reference note. Given that genuine AP representations are based on the identification of isolated notes by their tone chroma, they are considered to be invariant to (1) surrounding tonal context, (2) changes in instrumental timbre, and (3) changes in octave register. However, there is considerable variability in the literature in terms of how AP is trained and tested along these dimensions, making recent claims about AP learning difficult to assess. Here, we examined the effect of tonal context on participant success with a single-note identification training paradigm, including how learning generalized to an untested instrument and octave. We found that participants were able to rapidly learn to distinguish C from other notes, with and without feedback and regardless of the tonal context in which C was presented. Participants were also able to partly generalize this skill to an untrained instrument. However, participants displayed the weakest generalization in recognizing C in a higher octave. The results indicate that participants were likely attending to pitch height in addition to pitch chroma - a conjecture that was supported by analyzing the pattern of response errors. These findings highlight the complex nature of note representation in AP, which requires note identification across contexts, going beyond the simple storage of a note fundamental. The importance of standardizing testing that spans both timbre and octave in assessing AP and further implications on past literature and future work are discussed.

Musical instrument familiarity affects statistical learning of tone sequences.

Most listeners have an implicit understanding of the rules that govern how music unfolds over time. This knowledge is acquired in part through statistical learning, a robust learning mechanism that allows individuals to extract regularities from the environment. However, it is presently unclear how this prior musical knowledge might facilitate or interfere with the learning of novel tone sequences that do not conform to familiar musical rules. In the present experiment, participants listened to novel, statistically structured tone sequences composed of pitch intervals not typically found in Western music. Between participants, the tone sequences either had the timbre of artificial, computerized instruments or familiar instruments (piano or violin). Knowledge of the statistical regularities was measured as by a two-alternative forced choice recognition task, requiring discrimination between novel sequences that followed versus violated the statistical structure, assessed at three time points (immediately post-training, as well as one day and one week post-training). Compared to artificial instruments, training on familiar instruments resulted in reduced accuracy. Moreover, sequences from familiar instruments - but not artificial instruments - were more likely to be judged as grammatical when they contained intervals that approximated those commonly used in Western music, even though this cue was non-informative. Overall, these results demonstrate that instrument familiarity can interfere with the learning of novel statistical regularities, presumably through biasing memory representations to be aligned with Western musical structures. These results demonstrate that real-world experience influences statistical learning in a non-linguistic domain, supporting the view that statistical learning involves the continuous updating of existing representations, rather than the establishment of entirely novel ones.

Lockdown, bottoms up? Changes in adolescent substance use across the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic notably altered adolescent substance use during the initial stage (Spring 2020) of the pandemic. The purpose of this longitudinal study is to examine trajectories of adolescent substance use across the pandemic and subsequent periods of stay-at-home orders and re-opening efforts. We further examined differences as a function of current high school student versus graduate status. Adolescents (n = 1068, 14-18 years, Mage = 16.95 years and 76.7% female at T1) completed 4 different self-report surveys, starting during the first stay-at-home order and ending approximately 14 months later. Negative binomial hurdle models predicted: (1) the likelihood of no substance use and (2) frequency of days of substance use. As hypothesized, results demonstrated significant increases in adolescents' likelihood of alcohol use, binge drinking, and cannabis use once initial stay-at-home orders were lifted, yet few changes occurred as a result of a second stay-at-home order, with rates never lowering again to that of the first lockdown. Further, graduates (and particularly those who transitioned out of high school during the study) demonstrated a greater likelihood and frequency of substance use and were more stable in their trajectories across periods of stay-at-home orders than current high school students. Unexpectedly, however, there was a strong increase in current high school students' likelihood of e-cigarette use and a significant linear increase in participants' frequency of e-cigarette use over the study. Results suggest adolescent substance use, and in particular, e-cigarette use among current high school students, may be of increasing concern as the pandemic evolves.

Stroke masquerading as cardiac arrest: the artery of Percheron.

The artery of Percheron (AOP) is a rare arterial variant of the thalamic blood supply. Due to the densely packed collection of nuclei it supplies, an infarction of the AOP can be devastating. Here we highlight a patient who had an AOP stroke in the community, which was initially managed as cardiac arrest. AOP strokes most often present with vague symptoms such as reduced conscious level, cognitive changes and confusion without obvious focal neurology, and therefore are often missed at the initial clinical assessment. This case highlights the importance of recognising an AOP stroke as a cause of otherwise unexplained altered consciousness level and the use of MRI early in the diagnostic work-up.

Individual differences in human frequency-following response predict pitch labeling ability.

The frequency-following response (FFR) provides a measure of phase-locked auditory encoding in humans and has been used to study subcortical processing in the auditory system. While effects of experience on the FFR have been reported, few studies have examined whether individual differences in early sensory encoding have measurable effects on human performance. Absolute pitch (AP), the rare ability to label musical notes without reference notes, provides an excellent model system for testing how early neural encoding supports specialized auditory skills. Results show that the FFR predicts pitch labelling performance better than traditional measures related to AP (age of music onset, tonal language experience, pitch adjustment and just-noticeable-difference scores). Moreover, the stimulus type used to elicit the FFR (tones or speech) impacts predictive performance in a manner that is consistent with prior research. Additionally, the FFR predicts labelling performance for piano tones better than unfamiliar sine tones. Taken together, the FFR reliably distinguishes individuals based on their explicit pitch labeling abilities, which highlights the complex dynamics between sensory processing and cognition.

Revisiting discrete versus continuous models of human behavior: The case of absolute pitch.

Many human behaviors are discussed in terms of discrete categories. Quantizing behavior in this fashion may provide important traction for understanding the complexities of human experience, but it also may bias understanding of phenomena and associated mechanisms. One example of this is absolute pitch (AP), which is often treated as a discrete trait that is either present or absent (i.e., with easily identifiable near-perfect "genuine" AP possessors and at-chance non-AP possessors) despite emerging evidence that pitch-labeling ability is not all-or-nothing. We used a large-scale online assessment to test the discrete model of AP, specifically by measuring how intermediate performers related to the typically defined "non-AP" and "genuine AP" populations. Consistent with prior research, individuals who performed at-chance (non-AP) reported beginning musical instruction much later than the near-perfect AP participants, and the highest performers were more likely to speak a tonal language than were the lowest performers (though this effect was not as statistically robust as one would expect from prior research). Critically, however, these developmental factors did not differentiate the near-perfect AP performers from the intermediate AP performers. Gaussian mixture modeling supported the existence of two performance distributions-the first distribution encompassed both the intermediate and near-perfect AP possessors, whereas the second distribution encompassed only the at-chance participants. Overall, these results provide support for conceptualizing intermediate levels of pitch-labeling ability along the same continuum as genuine AP-level pitch labeling ability-in other words, a continuous distribution of AP skill among all above-chance performers rather than discrete categories of ability. Expanding the inclusion criteria for AP makes it possible to test hypotheses about the mechanisms that underlie this ability and relate this ability to more general cognitive mechanisms involved in other abilities.

Cortical mechanisms of talker normalization in fluent sentences.

Adjusting to the vocal characteristics of a new talker is important for speech recognition. Previous research has indicated that adjusting to talker differences is an active cognitive process that depends on attention and working memory (WM). These studies have not examined how talker variability affects perception and neural responses in fluent speech. Here we use source analysis from high-density EEG to show that perceiving fluent speech in which the talker changes recruits early involvement of parietal and temporal cortical areas, suggesting functional involvement of WM and attention in talker normalization. We extend these findings to acoustic source change in general by examining understanding environmental sounds in spoken sentence context. Though there may be differences in cortical recruitment to processing demands for non-speech sounds versus a changing talker, the underlying mechanisms are similar, supporting the view that shared cognitive-general mechanisms assist both talker normalization and speech-to-nonspeech transitions.

Manual directional gestures facilitate cross-modal perceptual learning.

Action and perception interact in complex ways to shape how we learn. In the context of language acquisition, for example, hand gestures can facilitate learning novel sound-to-meaning mappings that are critical to successfully understanding a second language. However, the mechanisms by which motor and visual information influence auditory learning are still unclear. We hypothesize that the extent to which cross-modal learning occurs is directly related to the common representational format of perceptual features across motor, visual, and auditory domains (i.e., the extent to which changes in one domain trigger similar changes in another). Furthermore, to the extent that information across modalities can be mapped onto a common representation, training in one domain may lead to learning in another domain. To test this hypothesis, we taught native English speakers Mandarin tones using directional pitch gestures. Watching or performing gestures that were congruent with pitch direction (e.g., an up gesture moving up, and a down gesture moving down, in the vertical plane) significantly enhanced tone category learning, compared to auditory-only training. Moreover, when gestures were rotated (e.g., an up gesture moving away from the body, and a down gesture moving toward the body, in the horizontal plane), performing the gestures resulted in significantly better learning, compared to watching the rotated gestures. Our results suggest that when a common representational mapping can be established between motor and sensory modalities, auditory perceptual learning is likely to be enhanced.

Absolute pitch can be learned by some adults.

Absolute pitch (AP), the rare ability to name any musical note without the aid of a reference note, is thought to depend on an early critical period of development. Although recent research has shown that adults can improve AP performance in a single training session, the best learners still did not achieve note classification levels comparable to performance of a typical, "genuine" AP possessor. Here, we demonstrate that these "genuine" levels of AP performance can be achieved within eight weeks of training for at least some adults, with the best learner passing all measures of AP ability after training and retaining this knowledge for at least four months after training. Alternative explanations of these positive results, such as improving accuracy through adopting a slower, relative pitch strategy, are not supported based on joint analyses of response time and accuracy. The results also did not appear to be driven by extreme familiarity with a single instrument or octave range, as the post-training AP assessments used eight different timbres and spanned over seven octaves. Yet, it is also important to note that a majority of the participants only exhibited modest improvements in performance, suggesting that adult AP learning is difficult and that near-perfect levels of AP may only be achievable by subset of adults. Overall, these results demonstrate that explicit perceptual training in some adults can lead to AP performance that is behaviorally indistinguishable from AP that manifests within a critical period of development. Implications for theories of AP acquisition are discussed.

The Aesthetic Preference for Nature Sounds Depends on Sound Object Recognition.

People across the world seek out beautiful sounds in nature, such as a babbling brook or a nightingale song, for positive human experiences. However, it is unclear whether this positive aesthetic response is driven by a preference for the perceptual features typical of nature sounds versus a higher-order association of nature with beauty. To test these hypotheses, participants provided aesthetic judgments for nature and urban soundscapes that varied on ease of recognition. Results demonstrated that the aesthetic preference for nature soundscapes was eliminated for the sounds hardest to recognize, and moreover the relationship between aesthetic ratings and several measured acoustic features significantly changed as a function of recognition. In a follow-up experiment, requiring participants to classify these difficult-to-identify sounds into nature or urban categories resulted in a robust preference for nature sounds and a relationship between aesthetic ratings and our measured acoustic features that was more typical of easy-to-identify sounds. This pattern of results was replicated with computer-generated artificial noises, which acoustically shared properties with the nature and urban soundscapes but by definition did not come from these environments. Taken together, these results support the conclusion that the recognition of a sound as either natural or urban dynamically organizes the relationship between aesthetic preference and perceptual features and that these preferences are not inherent to the acoustic features. Implications for nature's role in cognitive and affective restoration are discussed.

Of cricket chirps and car horns: The effect of nature sounds on cognitive performance.

Attention restoration theory (ART) posits that stimuli found in nature may restore directed attention functioning by reducing demands on the endogenous attention system. In the present experiment, we assessed whether nature-related cognitive benefits extended to auditory presentations of nature, a topic that has been understudied. To assess directed attention, we created a composite measure consisting of a backward digit span task and a dual n-back task. Participants completed these cognitive measures and an affective questionnaire before and after listening to and aesthetically judging either natural or urban soundscapes (between-participants). Relative to participants who were exposed to urban soundscapes, we observed significant improvements in cognitive performance for individuals exposed to nature. Urban soundscapes did not systematically affect performance either adversely or beneficially. Natural sounds did not differentially change positive or negative affect, despite these sounds being aesthetically preferred to urban sounds. These results provide initial evidence that brief experiences with natural sounds can improve directed attention functioning in a single experimental session.

Corrigendum: Positive Effects of Nature on Cognitive Performance Across Multiple Experiments: Test Order but Not Affect Modulates the Cognitive Effects.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01413.].