Musical Processing in High Functioning

Children with Autism

P. HEATON, L. PRING, AND B. HERMELIN
School of Social Sciences, University of Greenwich,
Eltham, London SE9 2BR, United Kingdom

KEYWORDS: Autism; Savant, musical; Absolute pitch

The weak central coherence (WCC) theory of autism 1 proposes that autism is
characterized by a cognitive style that biases processing towards local features at the
expense of global, context-dependent meaning or gestalt. 2 However, some autistic
individuals, known as savants, show exceptional abilities within specific domains,
one of which is music. Musical savants all have absolute pitch ability and in addition
demonstrate detailed knowledge about key relationships in their improvisations and
memory reproductions.3 They do not appear to demonstrate deficits in global
processing, at least within their talent domain. In order to explore the link between
autistic cognition and savant musical ability, a series of experiments with musically
naive autistic children and intelligence- and age-matched normal controls were
carried out.
The first investigation replicated previous findings 4 that showed enhanced pitch
memory in musically naive autistic children. In that study, scores for pitch
discrimination and memory correlated with scores on the Block Design test, a marker
for WCC.5 This then raised the possibility that one developmental outcome of such a
cognitive style might be a predisposition toward absolute pitch ability.
In the study, subjects were exposed to musical tones that were presented in
conjunction with animal pictures. After completion of these familiarization trials, the
preexposed tones were presented in randomized order, and subjects were asked to
point to the animals with which they had previously been paired. The findings from
the experiment again showed that the children with autism were able to pair animals
and tones to a significantly higher level than controls.
In a second experiment children were presented with 48 melodic pitch intervals
and were asked to judge whether they moved up or down. The results showed that
children with autism demonstrated equally high levels of performance with small (1–
4 semitones), medium (5–8 semitones), and large (9–12 semitones) intervals,
whereas controls could only achieve such good performance with medium and large
intervals.
As previously suggested, WCC theory predicts that individuals with autism show
reduced susceptibility to gestalt forces; this has been demonstrated most recently in

Address for correspondence: Dr. Pamela Heaton, Psychology Department, Goldsmiths College,
University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, United Kingdom.
p.heaton@gold.ac.uk

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444 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
a task using visual illusions. 6 Musical chords are powerfully gestalt, and in two
experiments the ability to disembed individual tones from within chords was tested.
In the first phase, the children were again preexposed to four tone/animal pairs. In a
second phase, three of these component tones were played together and the children
were asked to point to the animal that was not included in the chord. The results
showed that half of the children with autism were able to identify 75% of the missing
animal/tone pairs. In a second chord experiment, the children were not preexposed to
any individual tones and no paired associate stimuli were provided. Subjects heard
major and minor tonic triads followed by an individual tone and were asked to judge
whether the target tone belonged to the chord that preceded it. In this study, no
significant difference between the performance of the autistic children and their
controls was found, and the findings suggested that normal holistic processing was in
evidence. Similar findings were obtained in a study where subjects were asked to
make same/different judgments about pairs of musical contours that were (1)
unchanged, (2) maintained, or (3) violated. It had been hypothesized that autistic
subjects would detect changes in melody pairs even when they preserved their global
characteristics. However, no group differences emerged, and the findings suggested
normal patterns of holistic processing. Overall, the findings from these studies
suggest that the information processing style characteristic of those with autism
conveys some advantage and no disadvantage when processing musical stimuli. This
might then help explain why music is one domain within which savant ability
flourishes.

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