Music and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Flashcards
- Describe Neurodevelopmental disorders.
- These are disorders that effect the brain or the central nervous system (CNS).
- They are present before birth, at birth or occur in the first years of life.
- Name 4 Neurodevelopmental disorders.
- Autism
- Down Syndrome
- Dyslexia
- **Williams Syndrome **
- Name characteristics common to Neurodevelopmental Disorders that may impact on music perception and cognition
- Motor difficulties
- Sensory difficulties
- Perceptual difficulties
- Memory difficulties
- **Difficulties in extracting structures from auditory stimuli **
- Describe Autism
Autism Spectrum:
- Cognitive Impairment Not universal.
- IQ ranges between low and very high
- Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts.
- Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests, or activities.
- What did Kanner (1943) find in autism case studies?
Kanner (1943). Unusual musical skills noted in 6 of the 11 cases discussed.
Case 2 “at two and a half he sang about twenty or thirty songs”
Case 9 “by a year and half he could discriminate between 18 symphonies and recognised the composer as soon as the first movement started”
Case 10 “Child heard the father whistling and immediately identified it as Mendelssohn’s violin concerto”
- What is the Weak Central Coherence Theory?
The weak central coherence theory (WCC), also called the central coherence theory (CC), suggests that a specific perceptual-cognitive style, loosely described as a limited ability to understand context or to “see the big picture”, underlies the central disturbance in autism and related autism spectrum disorders.
Autism is characterised by a cognitive style that biases processing in favour of local features at the expense of global context-dependent meaning or Gestalt.
**(Happé, 1999) **
- What did (Hobson, 1989) illustrate?
Affective (emotional) and interpersonal deficits are the core impairments in autism.
- Pitch discrimination and memory
**in children with autism **
Participants: musically untrained children with autism (HFA) and normal development match on CA, VIQ & Non- VIQ
Method: paired learning paradigm
Tones and word fragments paired with visual images
Featural processing bias (described in cognitive theories of autism) manifested in unusual pitch processing.
Search for deficits global, context-dependent meaning or Gestalt.
Chords involve grouping processes. They provide important information about musical key.
- Dowling: represent melodies 2 ways what are they?
(1) contour (shape)
Hypothesis. Children with autism will represent unfamiliar melodies in detailed form.
(2) detailed representation (intervals)
- State evidence that autistic people can perceive small pitch changes without musical training.
Case study of adolescent boy without music training showed highly analytic perception of contours (Heaton et al., 1999)
Mottron et al.,(2000) carried out a musical contour task with autistic adults and obtained similar findings.
But this did not seem to limit the participants (e.g. they weren’t stuck on pitch cues) because they could recognise melodies in transposition
- Autistic participants outperform matched controls on what?
- Pitch discrimination
- Pitch memory
Studies testing “global processing” (e.g. chords & melodies) failed to reveal any group differences
Autistic children showed the same pattern of performance as typical children
and adults • (Heaton, • Williams, Cummins & • Happe, 2007)
- What is dyslexia?
Dyslexia is a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling.
Characteristic features of dyslexia are difficulties in phonological awareness, verbal memory and verbal processing speed.
Dyslexia occurs across the range of intellectual abilities.
It is best thought of as a continuum, not a distinct category, and there are no clear cut-off points.
- Name studies illustrating difficulties in dyslexics.
Other cognitive difficulties observed in Dyslexia
- Short-term memory (Jorm et al., 1986)
- otor skills (Nicolson & Fawcett, 1994)
- Auditory and Visual Perceptual problems (Tallal et la., 1993)
- Rapid perceptual processing deficits **(Tallal et al., 1993) **
- What did Overy 2003 find?
Overy, 2003
Compared a group of Dyslexic children with age matched TD controls and observed no deficits in pitch processing in the dyslexic group.
1) melody discrimination (matching 3 tone melodies)
2) pitch discrimination (same/different)
3) pitch matching (child found the note on the keyboard)
- What area of musical skills have studies shown dyslexics may suffer from?
Dyslexic children similar to controls on tests measuring perception of metre but impaired on rhythm skills and rapid skills
Rhythm: (1) repeating back rhythms (2) discriminating two rhythmic fragments (3) tapping rhythm to happy birthday whilst singing it
Rapid skills: (1) saying whether high or low C came first (2) saying how many taps they had heard (3) saying whether two groups of taps had the same number of notes
- Describe **Williams Syndrome **
First described in the 1950s
Can be diagnosed at birth by genetic or metabolic markers
The have a very uneven cognitive profile with relative sparing of some aspects of language (vocab & syntax) and very poor visuo-spatial skills.
Levitin in a recent documentary worked with a 22 year old woman who could not tie her shoes or tell the time (even 1 second) but could sing many pop songs perfectly.
- Is emotion processing domain specific or domain general?
Many, but not all experimental studies into emotion processing in autism have revealed deficits. Studies testing emotion recognition in Williams Syndrome have revealed deficits relative to typically developing (TD) controls and children with autism
- Most studies have used face stimuli when they can not read facial cues well
