Dissociation of musical tonality and pitch memory from nonmusical cognitive abilities

Abstract The main purposes of this study were to replicate, validate, and extend measures of sensitivity to musical pitch and to determine whether performance on tests of tonal structure and pitch memory was related to, or dissociated from, performance on tests of nonmusical cognitive skills — standardized tests of cognitive abstrac-tion, vocabulary, and memory for digits and nonrepre-sentational figures. Factor analyses of data from 100 neurologically intact participants revealed a dissociation between music and nonmusic variables, both for the full data set and a set for which the possible contribution of levels of music training was statistically removed. A neurologically impaired participant, C.N., scored within the range of matched controls on nonmusic tests but much lower than controls on music tests. The study provides further evidence of a functional specificity for musical pitch abilities. How various types of cognitive abilities are related, and further, how musical abilities are related to other abilities are questions with both a long history and current impor-tance in cognitive psychology and the psychology of music. Music listening and performance engage a variety of processing levels — from elementary sensory-motor encoding to higher-level relational and symbolic represen-tations. Music perception and cognition invite compari-sons to other perceptual and cognitive processes, both in terms of commonalities and of differences. For example, both music and speech are highly struc-tured forms of communication processed by the auditory system. It has been suggested that precocious abilities in music and speech emerge from common origins (e.g.