autism and pitch processing: a precursor for savant musical ability

Autism and Pitch Processing: A Precursor for Savant Musical Ability?Author(s): Pamela Heaton, Beate Hermelin and Linda PringSource: Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Spring, 1998), pp. 291-305Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40285769 .

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Music Perception © 1998 by the regents of the Spring 1998, Vol. 15, No. 3, 291-305 university of California

Autism and Pitch Processing: A Precursor for Savant Musical Ability?

PAMELA HEATON, BEATE HERMELIN, & LINDA PRING Goldsmiths3 College, University of London

Musically naive autistic children were compared with musically naive mental age-matched control subjects for their ability to identify and remember single-note frequencies or speech sounds. As an analogy to testing for absolute pitch, subjects were asked after two different time intervals to point out animal pictures previously paired with these stimuli. The results showed that although both groups identified and recalled speech sounds equally well, those with autism demonstrated a superior ability for single-note identification over both time intervals. The findings are discussed in terms of an enhanced capacity, characteristic of autistic persons, to process and retain isolated, context-independent elements of stimulus arrays.

Introduction

The term idiot savant was initially used by Binet ( 1 894) to describe those persons who, in spite of a low level of general cognitive ability, nevertheless show some outstanding skill in an isolated domain. Early published ac- counts of savant abilities were largely descriptive and have been reviewed by Treffert (1989). More recent experimental investigations into the nature of these specific talents and the cognitive characteristics underlying them have been focused on the areas of calendrical calculation (Hermelin & O'Connor, 1986), drawing ability (Hermelin & O'Connor, 1990; Pring & Hermelin, 1993; Pring, Hermelin, & Heavey, 1995) and music (Hermelin, O'Connor, & Lee, 1987; Hermelin, O'Connor, &c Treffert, 1989; Miller, 1989). Hill (1977) reported a frequency of one savant in 2000 among persons with a general mental handicap. However, among persons with a diagnosis of autism, specific, isolated abilities are much more frequently found (Rimland, 1978). Autism is a developmental disorder characterized by im-

Address correspondence to Pamela Heaton, Psychology Department, Goldsmiths' Col- lege, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, United Kingdom.

291



292 Pamela Heaton, Beate Hermelin, &Linda Pring

pairments in socialization, communication, and cognition. In our sample of approximately 50 savants, about 70% have a reliable diagnosis of autism. Thus it may be asked whether particular cognitive characteristics that have frequently been observed in autistic persons may act as possible precursors for a subsequent manifestation of savant talent.

In autism, an uneven intelligence profile has consistently been reported. Both Kanner (1943) and Asperger (1944) initially observed uneven and unusual patterns of intellectual development in autistic children, and these observations have repeatedly been confirmed (Happé, 1994). Thus although many studies have highlighted the particular deficits characterizing the disorder, other studies have demonstrated superiority of autistic persons on specific experimental tasks compared with intelligence-matched or mental age-matched control subjects (Frith, 1970a, 1970b; Happé,1996; Hermelin & O'Connor, 1970; Hobson, Ouston, & Lee, 1988; Langdell, 1978; Shah &C Frith, 1983, 1993). Thus it appears that autistic cognition cannot be explained in terms of a simple deficit model alone (Frith, 1989). For in- stance, relatively high performance on the Block Design subtest from the Wechsler intelligence scale (1981) has been shown to be characteristic of persons with autism (Allen, Lincoln, &c Kaufman, 1991; Bartak, Rutter, & Cox, 1975; Lockyer &c Rutter, 1970; Szatmari, Tuff, Finlayson, & Bartolucci, 1990; Venter, Lord, &c Schopler, 1992). Experimental investigation of this finding by Shah and Frith (1993) has provided important insights into our understanding of the underlying cognitive characteristics of this specific ability.

In the Block Design test, a total pattern that is presented as a model has to be reconstructed from separate fragments, and Shah and Frith (1993), using a method that isolated the different components of the task, were able to show that the high levels of performance seen among the autistic subjects could be attributed solely to the enhanced capacity of the autistic subjects for mental segmentation and not to superior general spatial ability. Shah and Frith have interpreted their findings as reflecting a tendency among persons with autism to process the constituent single elements of a display, rather than dealing with the display in terms of a holistic Gestalt. Frith (1989) regards such a processing bias toward segmentation, also called weak central coherence, as a cognitive characteristic typical of people with a diagnosis of autism. Although such weak central coherence must usually lead to a disadvantage in the interpretation of input, it also opens up the possibility that the same tendency toward such segmentation of a stimulus array may also give rise to high levels of performance on those tasks where relatively piecemeal processing is advantageous. Thus according to Shah and Frith (1993), the superior performance on Block Design, as well as on other related tests, for example, on Object Assembly (Wechsler, 1981) and the Children's Embedded Figures Test (Witkin, Oltman, Raskin, & Karp,



Autism and Fitch Processing: A Precursor for Savant Musical Ability? 293

1971), appears to be due to a cognitive style favoring local over global processing.

In order to investigate whether such a processing style may have any relevance to savant-specific ability, Pring, Hermelin, and Heavey (1995) compared autistic savant artists and normal mental age-matched children who were also artistically gifted, as well as appropriately matched nongifted control subjects, on the Block Design test. They found an enhanced ability to reconstruct the total block designs from their fragments in autistic persons, and this effect was even more pronounced for autistic savants with outstanding drawing skill than for persons without this ability. Similar high levels of performance on the Block Design test were also observed for the artistically gifted normal children. Related results have been obtained by Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi (1976), who observed superior performance by normal art students on the Hidden Figures Test. This test also is con- cerned with focusing on isolated features rather than on the whole configu- ration, and Shah and Frith (1983) reported a superior ability for identify- ing embedded figures among autistic adolescents. Such results may thus suggest that there may be a capacity among those with autism to resist what Bartlett (1932) described as "an overmastering tendency simply to get a general impression of the whole." In autism, such a tendency may be less "overmastering." For example, in a study of an artistic savant diagnosed as autistic, Mottron and Belleville (1993) did not find a hierarchical structure where holistic overrode local processing. Instead they found an even balance between the two types of strategy. In view of this, one might ask whether such an atypical balance between local and global processing strategies might in some instances play a part in the manifestation of specific savant skills. This might then help to explain the disproportionate frequency of autistic savant ability found in the general mentally handicapped population.

In this context, it is interesting to consider how such a bias might be manifested in the processing of musical stimuli. In music processing, both local and global strategies play a part, although it appears that within this domain, as in others, global strategies tend to dominate. So, although most normal persons can perceive individual tones and may even have some veridical memories for pitches (Levitin, 1994), when processing musical structures, that is, melodies, perception tends to be holistic, with "information about pitch contour dominating at the expense of absolute pitch and interval information" (Trehub &c Trainor, 1993). As Clarke (1989) suggests, listeners "accumulate and integrate individual notes of a performance . . . into successively more abstract and global representations." What then may be the relevance of such typical musical processing biases for persons with autism who display weak global processing? One possibility is that a tendency for local processing within the musical domain might increase the



https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248930304_Mind_the_gap_Formal_structures_and_psychological_processes_in_music?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-316e05fd-774f-4763-91c9-b932f0797317&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzIzOTIxNDAyMTtBUzo5OTU5NDM2MDg1MjQ4MUAxNDAwNzU2NTU0MDM2

294 Pamela Heaton, Béate Hermelin, ôcLinda Pring

saliency of some "surface pattern" elements (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983), for example individual pitches, and this may in turn have implications for the kind of musical representations held by these individuals.

A great deal of research into pitch processing and pitch memory in normal populations has been done, and this work has frequently focused on the phenomenon of absolute pitch (for a review, see Takeuchi & Hulse, 1993). Absolute pitch ability has been defined as the ability to produce or identify specific pitches without reference to an external standard (Baggaley, 1974). This definition encompasses the notion that representations of individual pitches and pitch labels become established in long-term memory. It is a rare phenomenon, observed in only one of 10,000 persons (Profita & Bidder, 1988; Takeuchi & Hulse, 1993). There is, however, increasing evidence that absolute pitch in partial form is more frequently found (Deutsch, Moore, & Dolson, 1986; Halpern, 1989; Levitin, 1994; Terhardt & Seewan, 1983; Terhardt & Ward, 1982). These results suggest that persons who are not absolute pitch possessors in accordance with the strict definition of this term do nevertheless demonstrate some ability, in certain conditions, to process pitch information absolutely. In the light of this, Levitin (1994) has suggested that absolute pitch should be considered to comprise two components: pitch memory, which occurs more frequently, and pitch labeling, which is rare. Hence, many persons do show pitch memory, whereas persons with both abilities, that is, true absolute pitch possessors, are far less commonly encountered.

Why absolute pitch ability in its full form develops in some people and not in others still remains an open question, although existing studies seem to point to the role early learning can play in absolute pitch development (Takeuchi & Hulse, 1993). For example, there is evidence that early onset of musical training is correlated with both a high likelihood of possessing absolute pitch (Bachem, 1940, 1955; Miyazaki, 1988a, 1988b; Sergeant, 1969; Takeuchi, 1989; van Krevelen, 1951) and high levels of accuracy in absolute pitch judgments (Miyazaki, 1988a; Sergeant, 1969). Takeuchi and Hulse (1993) also suggest that attempts to teach absolute pitch to children appear to have met with some success (Grebelnik, 1984; Oura & Eguchi, 1981) whereas similar attempts with adults, although effecting some limited improvement in absolute pitch identification generally, do not provide strong evidence that absolute pitch can be learned by adults. Levitin (1994), in considering the evidence for latent absolute pitch ability, suggests that individuals might not acquire pitch labels, despite having pitch memory, because they are not exposed to music, or do not receive musical training during a critical period of development. It must be said however, that many people who grow up in a musical environment and undergo early musical training do not develop true absolute pitch ability.



https://www.researchgate.net/publication/19954966_The_Speed_of_Musical_Pitch_Identification_by_Absolute-Pitch_Possessors?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-316e05fd-774f-4763-91c9-b932f0797317&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzIzOTIxNDAyMTtBUzo5OTU5NDM2MDg1MjQ4MUAxNDAwNzU2NTU0MDM2

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/246138581_Experimental_Investigation_of_Absolute_Pitch?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-316e05fd-774f-4763-91c9-b932f0797317&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzIzOTIxNDAyMTtBUzo5OTU5NDM2MDg1MjQ4MUAxNDAwNzU2NTU0MDM2

Autism and Pitch Processing: A Precursor for Savant Musical Ability? 295

It should be stressed that absolute pitch is not a reliable marker for outstanding musical talent in normal populations, as many highly gifted musi- cians do not show this ability. However, in the present context, it is of relevance that among musical savants absolute pitch is prevalent, and although it cannot in itself explain the phenomena, it may nevertheless func- tion as an important mediating or associated factor (Miller, 1989). Despite Rimland's suggestion (1964) that musical interests and/or abilities are uni- versal in autistic children, little firm evidence for this assumption exists, and there is a scarcity of research regarding either absolute pitch or more general musical cognition among autistic persons who have not been identified as musically gifted. Blackstock (1978) found that when autistic children were given a free choice between musical and verbal information, they predominantly chose musical information. In contrast, children in a nonautistic, age-matched control group failed to show a preference for one type of stimulus over the other. Some limited evidence of an enhanced capacity for reproducing musical stimuli was provided by Applebaum, Egel, Koegel, and Imhoff (1979), who compared musically able normal with unselected autistic children for their ability to sing back notes and musical fragments. He found that the autistic children performed as well as or better than the musically more experienced normal control subjects. Applebaum et al. (1979) suggest that the kind of musical memory ability they found among autistic subjects may have reflected a sophisticated form of musical echolalia. Such musical echolalia must of course be distinguished from absolute pitch ability, where long term representations of individual pitches and pitch labels are established.

In the present study, we are attempting to identify possible precursors for musical savant ability within the general autistic population. The savant syndrome is a complex phenomenon, and it appears that no single etiologic factor can explain the appearance of musical talent in such subjects (Miller, 1989). It is the case, however, that all musical savants for whom data have been published possess absolute pitch (Miller, 1989). The role absolute pitch plays in the development of the savant syndrome must to some extent remain a subject of speculation, but as Miller points out, musical savant ability emerges during the developmental period when the young child is constructing some of the first hierarchical organized systems of knowledge in different domains. Persons with cognitive abnormalities and/or sensory deficits, but with a good sense of chroma identification, may yet be able to map and structure the input from the musical environment by using the kinds of cognitive strategies that unimpaired persons bring to the learning process in other domains, for example, language (Miller, 1989). It must be stressed that absolute pitch is not in itself sufficient for the emergence of the musical savant syndrome, indeed Miller describes one



296 Pamela Heaton, Beate Hermelin, &Linda Pring

handicapped child with absolute pitch who does not appear to be develop- ing savant skills, but it nevertheless appears to be basic to it. Interestingly, we have found several autistic savants who are not gifted for music but for art and calendrical calculation who also demonstrate absolute pitch ability (Pring, Hermelin, &c Heaton, 1998).

The hypothesis to be tested here states that we will find more subjects with absolute pitch ability among musically naive autistic children than in mental age-matched control subjects. The rationale that gives rise to this prediction is based on the following observations: (1) most savants are autistic, (2) a large majority, if not all musical savants, possess absolute pitch, (3) absolute pitch ability appears to be characterized by the presence of labeled, retrievable memory representations for individual pitches that operate independent of context information, and (4) a tendency to focus on single elements of stimulus arrays has been found to be characteristic of autistic information processing. In the following study, therefore, we de- vised a paradigm approximately analogous to determining absolute pitch ability, which will test identification and memory for single tones in musically naive autistic children and normal children. As a control condition, we used the same procedure as used with tones for speech sounds.

Method

SUBJECTS

Ten autistic boys between 7 and 13 years old (mean, 9.9 years old) took part in the experiment. Their IQs on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised ranged from 55 to 127 (mean IQ, 85.5; mean mental age; 8.4 years), and they all were attending a school for able autistic children. Of this group, nine children were reliably diagnosed as suffering from autism and one from Asperger syndrome. Asperger syndrome applies to children who, although sharing many characteristics with persons with autism, have generally better language ability. No children with either visual or auditory impairments were included in the experiment. None of the children in either the experimental or the control group had under- gone specific musical training, nor had any of them been noted as having an outstanding musical ability. The control group contained ten normal boys, between 5 and 11.6 years old (mean age, 8.1 years), of average academic ability, who were matched on an individual basis for chronological age to the mental ages of the autistic group. Thus the control children were younger than the autistic subjects. As the existing evidence points toward an early learning theory of absolute pitch development (Takeuchi & Hulse, 1993), it could be argued that the younger control children might thus have had an advantage in this experiment. As this would bias the results against the experimental hypothesis, it further justifies the matching procedure used here.

MATERIALS

Two types of stimuli were used: tones and speech sounds. The musical tones were C4, E4, G4, and B4, and they were presented on a Casiotone 202 electronic keyboard (acoustic piano setting) by the experimenter. The waveforms produced by this keyboard are gener-




ated digitally with Casio's proprietorial system and do not correspond to the harmonic content associated with the standard analog waveforms (sawtooth, pulse/square, triangle, sine, noise). The spoken speech sounds were la, ta, da, and ha. Each of the tones and speech sounds were presented in conjunction with a picture of a different animal. All of these pictures were taken from the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) Picture Norms Set. Figure 1 shows the tone/animal pairs and the speech sound/animal pairs.

pitch/label familiarization procedure

Subjects were first exposed individually to a brief familiarization period, during which they learned to identify a particular tone as being the favorite one of a particular animal. Thus the child was told " this is the note that the snake likes best." The four notes were presented in quasi-randomized order over 48 trials. The 48 trials were randomized in such a way that the child heard each particular tone and was shown its associated picture 12 times during the total training procedure, that is, four times in each of the following three main blocks: for the first block of 16 training trials, the four animal pictures were placed

Fig. 1. Animal-tone pairs (top) and animal-speech sound pairs (bottom).




together in front of the child. The child was asked to name each of the animal pictures and was told after each naming response that this animal had a favorite tone. The tone was then sounded while the experimenter pointed to the appropriate animal picture. During the sec- ond block of 16 trials, the animal pictures were removed, thus focusing concentration on the auditory stimuli alone. Before each tone was sounded, the experimenter said, for in- stance, "we will now hear the cat's favorite note." Following this, the procedure used for the first 16 trials was repeated in the last 16-trial block. This part of the procedure served to establish associations between a tone and its label. No responses were required or recorded at this phase of the experiment.

PITCH IDENTIFICATION

After the familiarization session, the child was engaged in conversation about an unre- lated topic for a period of 2lli minutes. The four animal pictures were then again placed together before the child. The previously presented tones were sounded over 16 trials in a quasi-randomized order, so that every tone was heard four times. The child was asked to respond to each sounded tone by pointing to the animal "that liked this tone best."

PITCH MEMORY

After a week's interval, a memory test was carried out. The four animal pictures were again placed before the child. The previously presented tones were again sounded over 16 trials in a different quasi-randomized order. Again, the child was asked to identify each animal's favorite note. No prior exposure to the tones was given at this session. In both the identification and memory tasks, subjects were awarded a score of one for each correctly identified or remembered tone. Thus, optimal performance on each of these two tests would result in a score of 16.

SPEECH SOUNDS

Speech sounds were tested on a separate occasion. The identification and memory of speech sounds was used as a control condition for pitch identification and memory. Thus, by using a comparable method for the two types of stimuli, we attempted to ensure that any emerging group differences would not be due to a differential ability to cope with the experimental procedure, but would instead reflect a difference between groups in dealing with the two types of stimuli. For the speech sounds condition, four new animal pictures were selected to be paired with la, ta, da, and ha (Figure 1). The procedure used for training, identification, and memory was exactly the same as that previously used for pitch.

Results

The means and standard deviations for both experimental conditions on identification and memory are shown in Table 1. An analysis of variance on test/retest (identification/memory) and stimulus type (music/speech sounds) as within-group variables, and diagnosis (autistic/control subjects) as the between-group variable, was carried out on the data. The analysis revealed a significant effect of test/retest, F(l, 18) = 16.85, p < .001, with better performance overall on the initial testing session, that is, the test of identification. No significant effect of diagnosis was found, P(l, 18) = 2.22, ns. Speech sound stimuli were dealt with significantly more effectively than




Table 1 Mean (SD) Number of Correctly Identified and Memorized Items across

Conditions and Subjects

Identification Memory Pitch Speech Pitch Speech

Autistic 11.7 11.0 8.9 8.0 (4.52) (5.65) (4.87) (4.44)

Control subjects 5.8 13.3 4.0 9.5 (3.08) (4.39) (1.56) (3.62)

Optimal score = 16.

pitch stimuli, F(l, 18) = 6.89, p < .017; however, there was also a highly significant interaction of Diagnosis x Stimuli F(l9 18) = 11.31, p < .003 (Figure 2).

Following the recommendation of Howell (1987), the interaction was subjected to a simple effects procedure, including a Bonferoni adjustment such that p < .0125 would be the accepted level of significance. This analysis revealed a highly significant effect of Pitch x Diagnosis, F(l, 18) = 12.26, p < .003, with the autistic group significantly more able than control subjects to identify and remember single notes. This was not the case for speech sounds, where no significant difference between the groups was observed, F(l, 18) = 1.32, ns. Also, for autistic subjects, we found no significant difference between speech sounds and pitch scores, P(l, 18) = 0.27, ns, whereas for control subjects, this difference was significant, F(l, 18) = 17.93, p < .001, with control subjects performing better in the speech sound than in the pitch condition.

Correlations were performed on the psychometric and pitch data for the autistic group. Although a significant correlation between pitch performance and full IQ was found (r = .73, df - 8, p < .01), further analysis revealed that this effect was primarily due to the highly significant correlation between performance IQ and pitch performance (r = .8116, df = 8, p < .004). Pitch performance and verbal IQ did not correlate significantly (r = .3541, df- 8, ns) . Analyses of the subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children revealed a correlation between Block Design scores and pitch performance (r = .73, df= 8,p < .01) and Object Assembly scores and pitch performance (r = .74, df - 8, p < .01). None of the verbal subtests correlated with pitch scores. The only significant correlation found for the speech sound condition was with vocabulary (r = .66, df= 8, p < .03). Pitch and speech sound scores were not significantly correlated with each other (r = .24, df- 8, ns). As the normal children in the study were individually matched for chronological age with the mental age of the autistic subjects, no intelligence test scores were available for them, therefore correlations could not




Fig. 2. Mean number of stimuli correctly identified and memorized by autistic children (gray bars) and control subjects (black bars).

be carried out on such data. However, as with the autistic group, a correlation was carried out between pitch and speech sounds, and although this correlation was negative, no significant relationship was found (r = -.38, df=S,ns).

Discussion

We had hypothesized that because musical savants with a diagnosis of autism frequently possess absolute pitch, a preponderance of musically naive autistic children may be able to identify and remember isolated notes. The results from the study have indeed shown that a group of autistic children without specialized musical training or specific musical talent showed a superior ability to control subjects to identify and remember labeled single notes. It had been demonstrated that a predominance of local over global processing was a crucial factor in the superior performance of those with autism on the Block Design test. In the present study, we found that the




performance on this test correlated highly with pitch performance in the autistic group, and this result strengthened the assumption that similar underlying cognitive processing strategies play a part in both operations. That this finding was specific to music was demonstrated by the results from the speech sound control condition. When the stimuli were speechlike sounds rather than tones, autistic and normal children remembered them equally well over both short and long time intervals. But while normal control subjects encoded, stored, and retrieved the speech sounds much better than the pitches, subjects with autism identified and retained both types of material at a similar high level.

Usually the inability of autistic individuals to assign learned note names prevents the identification of such a skill. Here, however, the paradigm used allowed this ability to become apparent. It appears from the present results that an autistic tendency toward segmented information processing (Shah & Frith, 1993) leads in turn to stable long-term representations, with a capacity for both pitch memory and pitch labeling (Levitin, 1994) being demonstrated. When performing the Block Design test, subjects are required to copy a total design to conform with a presented model. Hence these test requirements mean that performances do not provide insights into the structural properties of long-term-memory representations.

The good long-term memory for labeled pitches found in the autistic group indicates that, at least within the limitations of the experimental paradigm used here, the autistic children's superior pitch identifications cannot simply be explained in terms of some kind of "musical echolalia" (Applebaum et al., 1979). The present findings imply that an interpretation of autistic cognition as characterized by a "lack of central coherence" (Frith, 1989) should be extended to include the resulting consequences of such a processing bias for memory structures. This conclusion is supported by the significant correlation between Block Design performance and memory for pitch found for the autistic children.

In contrast to the autistic subjects, the control subjects performed at a significantly lower level on the tones than on the speech sounds. As the speech sounds had been paired with animal pictures, the normal children may have attempted to use semantic associations to connect the two types of material. Indeed, one child remarked that he could easily remember that ta went with duck because he was aware of the danger of tar on a duck's wing. The control children's low performance on the pitch condition may, in part, have been due to the inapplicability of such a semantic association strategy to the processing of pitch information. Although musical tones are meaningful for normal children when they operate in larger musical structures, they may well be less so when presented singly and without melodic context. The present findings appear to give support to this suggestion. Thus the hierarchical relevance of auditory stimuli may be differently orga-




nized for autistic and normal persons. In the present study, the autistic children identified single tones better than did the control subjects. Such a specific ability may be one possible precursor for the subsequent manifestation of musical ability among persons with autism.

Findings that autistic children prefer music to speech (Blackstock, 1978) may be due to the fact that music can be appreciated without reference to clearly defined semantic and pragmatic aspects. Miller (1989) suggests that music, like chess and mathematics, can be viewed as a closed system with its own internal rules and regularities; hence, it can be appreciated without reference to any broader context. In this sense, it can be likened to calen- dars, which also have their own internal structure, and calendrical calculation is another area in which autistic savants frequently demonstrate outstanding skill. Engaging in activities within such domains might allow some enhanced accessibility to persons who display the particular cognitive strategies that are characteristic of those with autism.

We are not suggesting here that normal gifted persons lack central coherence. Rather, we are suggesting that, when appropriate, such persons may have the option to adopt one of several processing strategies that could free them from the constraints of context dependency that normally deter- mines information processing (Getzels &c Csikszentmihalyi, 1976; Pring, Hermelin, & Heavey, 1995). For those with autism however, there may be a bias toward a local, rather than a global, processing strategy, a disadvantage in most contexts but also in some instances giving these individuals what Frith and Happé (1994) described as "privileged access" to aspects of the physical world that are normally overridden by tendencies toward holistic perception (Davies, Bishop, Manstead, & Tantams, 1994), processing (Shah &c Frith, 1983, 1993), and mental representations. We are suggesting here that such a cognitive style may go some way to account for the prevalence of persons with autism among the savant population.1

1. This research was supported by the Nuffield Foundation (Grant reference: DIR/05 ). We are grateful to the Headmistress Julia Cook and the teachers and children at Spring Hallows School, Ealing, who cooperated in this study. We would also like to thank Dr. D. Levitin, of the Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, for his helpful suggestions.

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autism and pitch processing: a precursor for savant musical ability

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