Publications by authors named "Mary E Sutherland"
Attention and working memory (WM) are core components of executive functions, and they can be enhanced by training. One activity that has shown to improve executive functions is musical training, but the brain networks underlying these improvements are not well known. We aimed to identify, using functional MRI (fMRI), these networks in children who regularly learn and play a musical instrument.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMusicians are trained in melodic transposition, the skill of extracting the pitch interval structure (i.e., the frequency ratios between pitches) and moving it into different keys (i.
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- Adults demonstrate diverse auditory skills, particularly in distinguishing foreign speech sounds, which may be influenced by the structural features of their auditory cortex.
- The study examined the relationship between gray-matter density in the left Heschl's gyrus and 2-Hz frequency-modulation (FM) detection abilities across adolescence through magnetic resonance imaging data collected from participants at ages 10, 11.5, and 13.
- Results indicated that although the correlation between FM threshold and gray-matter density was strong at age 10, it weakened with age, showing a unique pattern in boys at the oldest age, while a correlation between FM thresholds and language skills like spelling and reading was also observed but varied over time.
Absolute pitch (AP), the rare ability to identify a musical pitch, occurs at a higher rate among East Asian musicians. This has stimulated considerable research on the comparative contributions of genetic and environmental factors. Two studies examined whether a similar ethnicity effect is found for relative pitch (RP), identifying the distance or interval between two tones.
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