Preserved absolute pitch and musical working memory in posterior cortical atrophy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background The cognitive organisation of working memory for nonverbal sounds and the unusual musical ability of absolute pitch is poorly understood. We recently had the opportunity to investigate this in a musician with absolute pitch who developed posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), the canonical ‘visual variant’ of Alzheimer’s disease. Method We studied a 59 year old professional pianist, PA, known premorbidly to have absolute pitch and fulfilling diagnostic criteria for PCA, in comparison to five healthy age‐matched female musicians (three with absolute pitch, two without). Each participant completed the melodic organisation (scale, contour, interval) and rhythm subtests of the Montreal Battery for Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), an assessment of absolute pitch ability, a standard test of auditory verbal working memory (digit span), an equivalent working memory test for spoken letters and a series of bespoke musical working memory tasks assessing forward and reverse span for pitch sequences, rhythmic sequences and sequences combining these two dimensions. Result PA had reduced digit span and letter span relative to healthy musician controls, as anticipated from her diagnosis. However, she had retained absolute pitch and performed normally on MBEA subtests assessing pitch and rhythm patterns and within the healthy musician range on the bespoke tests of pitch and rhythm working memory. Across musical working memory tests, PA showed a profile similar to healthy musician controls with absolute pitch: all performed better on the pitch working memory task than other musical working memory tasks. On the pitch working memory test, PA performed better than the healthy musicians without absolute pitch, all of whom performed worse on the pitch task than other musical working memory tasks. Conclusion Our findings suggest that absolute pitch may be preserved and continue to support musical working memory (despite impaired verbal working memory) in PCA. This study has implications for our understanding of the cognitive and neural mechanisms of absolute pitch and nonverbal auditory working memory.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".