Lauren Stewart (Goldsmiths):
“Implicit and explicit processing in amusia” 

Abstract: Individuals with congenital amusia have lifelong difficulties in perceiving music; often failing to recognize culturally familiar tunes or to spot salient melodic violations in novel tunes. Much empirical work has used tasks requiring explicit judgments (eg same/different) where conscious access to musical knowledge is required. However, as this presentation will show, implicit methods for probing musical knowledge reveal a surprising level of musical competence. Two studies will be reported. The first uses a statistical learning paradigm to determine whether individuals with amusia can internalize transitional probabilities in a novel musical sequence. The second uses an implicit priming method to assess whether these same individuals can form expectations about how a melody will unfold. The results will be presented in the context of recent work which proposes that congenital amusia should be thought of as a disorder of conscious awareness (to musical knowledge), rather than a disorder of musical perception per se.

ALL ARE WELCOME.