Enhanced pitch sensitivity in individuals with autism: a signal detection analysis
Abstract
Past research has shown a superiority of participants with high-functioning autism over comparison groups in memorizing picture-pitch associations and in detecting pitch changes in melodies. A subset of individuals with autism, known as “musical savants,” is also known to possess absolute pitch. This superiority might be due to an abnormally high sensitivity to fine-grained pitch differences in sounds. To test this hypothesis, psychoacoustic tasks were devised so as to use a signal detection methodology. Participants were all musically untrained and were divided into a group of 12 high-functioning individuals with autism and a group of 12 normally developing individuals. Their task was to judge the pitch of pure tones in a “same-different” discrimination task and in a “high-low” categorization task. In both tasks, the obtained psychometric functions revealed higher pitch sensitivity for subjects with autism, with a more pronounced advantage over control participants in the categorization task. These findings confirm that pitch processing is enhanced in “high-functioning” autism. Superior performance in pitch discrimination and categorization extends previous findings of enhanced visual performance to the auditory domain. Thus, and as predicted by the enhanced perceptual functioning model for peaks of ability in autism (Mottron & Burack, 2001), autistic individuals outperform typically developing population in a variety of low-level perceptual tasks.
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Individuals with ASD show behavioral improvements for simple non-social sensory stimuli but deficits for more complex stimuli.
“those with ASD have been reported to show behavioral improvements when perceiving simple, non-social sensory stimuli, yet to show deficits when perceiving more complex stimuli (Bertone et al., 2003, 2005; Bonnel et al., 2003; Minshew and Hobson, 2008; Mottron et al., 2006; Ristic et al., 2005; Vlamings et al., 2005)”
From Behavioral, Perceptual, and Neural Alterations in Sensory and Multisensory Function in Autism Spectrum Disorder (2015) · cites this paper as Bonnel et al., 2003
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- Authors
- Bonnel, A., Mottron, L., Peretz, I., Trudel, M., Gallun, E., & Bonnel, A.-M.
- Affiliations
- University of California System (US)
- Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies (CA)
- Université de Montréal (CA)
- University of California
- Venue
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
- Publisher
- MIT Press
- Published
- 2003-02
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 226-235
- ISSN
- 0898-929X (ISSN-L)
- 1530-8898
- OpenAlex
- W2147784489
- Cited by
- 527
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 27 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 26 · 2020: 31 · 2019: 36 · 2018: 17 · 2017: 31 · 2016: 26 · 2015: 28 · 2014: 38 · 2013: 38 · 2012: 26
- FWCI
- 5.39
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Autism Spectrum Disorder Research
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neuroscience and Music Perception
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Developmental Neuroscience › Williams Syndrome Research
- Keywords
- autism spectrum disorder, pitch sensitivity, pitch discrimination, auditory perception, high-functioning autism, absolute pitch, psychometric functions, signal detection
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Adult, Analysis of Variance, Audiometry, Pure-Tone, Auditory Pathways, Autistic Disorder, Female, Humans, Male, Mental Processes, Pitch Discrimination, Pitch Perception, Random Allocation, ROC Curve, Sensory Thresholds, Confidence Intervals, Matched-Pair Analysis
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