Abstract
Congenital amusia, commonly known as tone deafness, is a lifelong impairment of music perception and production. It remains a question of debate whether the musical impairments observed in congenital amusia are paralleled in other non-musical perceptual abilities. Using behavioral and electrophysiological measures, the current study explored face perception and related neural mechanisms in congenital amusics. Both congenital amusics and matched controls performed a face perception task, where two upright (or inverted) faces were presented in sequence and the participants were required to make a “same” or “different” judgment. The general trend of the behavioral results showed that the congenital amusic group had slower reaction times than that in matched control group but the difference did not reach statistical significance. However, in EEG recordings, for both the congenital amusic group and the matched control group, compared to inverted faces, upright faces elicited more negative N170 amplitudes in the 130-210 ms time window at the occipito-temporal electrode sites in both left and right hemisphere (P7, P8). However, the congenital amusia elicited more delayed N170 peak latency than matched controls in both upright face and inverted face at occipital-temporal sites. The vertex positivity (VPP) was extracted at the average activity in a 130-210ms window at CPz where the VPP was largest. The peak amplitude and latency using time window of 170-230 ms was extracted at P2 in centrofrontal lobe sites (FC1, FC2). The congenital amusia group elicited more delayed VPP latency than the matched controls. For P200, larger P2 peak amplitude was elicited for the congenital amusia group than the controls group. Overall, the results of the present study suggest that the impairment attributed to congenital amusia is not only limited to music, but also extends to visual perception domain.