Do social and cognitive deficits curtail musical understanding? Evidence from autism and Down syndrome

Heaton, Pam F.; Allen, Rory; Williams, Kerry; Cummins, Omar and Happe, Francesca. 2010. Do social and cognitive deficits curtail musical understanding? Evidence from autism and Down syndrome. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 26(2), pp. 171-182. ISSN 0261510X [Article]

No full text available

Abstract or Description

Children with autism experience difficulties in understanding social affective cues, and it has been suggested that such deficits will generalize to music. In order to investigate this proposal, typically developing individuals and children with autism and Down syndrome were compared on tasks measuring perception of affective and movement states in music. The results showed that discrimination performance on both experimental conditions depended on chronological or verbal mental age rather than diagnosis. The findings suggest that emotion-processing deficits in the social domain do not generalize to music, and that musical understanding is closely related to the level of language development.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1348/026151007X206776

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Psychology

Dates:

DateEvent
2010Published

Item ID:

5308

Date Deposited:

21 Mar 2011 10:41

Last Modified:

30 Jun 2017 15:41

Peer Reviewed:

Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/5308

Edit Record Edit Record (login required)