Investigações sobre a modularidade do processamento cognitivo musical

• Ano de defesa: 2014
• Autor(a) principal: Marilia Nunes Silva
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais; UFMG
• Palavras-chave em Português: Modularidade; MBEA; Síndrome de Williams; Processamento numérico; Amusias; Processamento musical; Amusia; Neurociências; Williams, Síndrome de; Modularidade (Psicologia); Música Aspectos psicológicos; Processamento cognitivo musical
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/BUOS-9PFJJC

Modularity is one of the main issues in cognitive science. Because music is a complex cognitive function, it constitutes in a model for investigating the hypothesis of brain modular organization. Evidence in favor of modularity of musical cognitive processing indicate that musical functions are part of a distinct mental module with its own information processing system and specific neural substrate. This thesis aimed to investigate the hypothesis of modularity of musical cognitive processing from a multi-method and multi-sample strategy. For the development of research questions, this thesis was divided into five scientific papers. The first paper aimed to investigate the evidence related to the modularity of musical processing from an integrative review. The second paper aimed to verify the psychometric properties of the translated and adapted version of MBEA to Brazil. The third paper consists in a meta-analysis that aimed to investigate the nature of the deficit in congenital amusia, related to the musical encoding of pitch, from the effect size of the difference in performance between amusics and controls in pitch discrimination tasks. The fourth paper aimed to investigate whether there is an association between difficulties in processing numerical and pitch magnitudes in congenital amusics. The fifth paper investigated the relationship between musical and numerical processing in children and adolescents with Williams syndrome (WS). The fifth paper investigated the relationship between musical and numerical processing in children and adolescents with Williams syndrome (WS). From studies conducted, constitute evidence for the existence of shared or amodal mechanisms for cognitive music processing: 1) the relation of pitch discrimination deficit with a general acoustical deficit in congenital amusics; 2) the association observed between music perception and difficulties in symbolic magnitudes comparison in congenital amusics and; 3) the association observed between number sense and music perception in children and adolescents. In contrast, constitute evidence for the hypothesis of the modularity of musical cognitive processing: 1) the double dissociation found between the acoustic processing and tonal encoding module in congenital amusics; 2) the dissociation found in the magnitude processing between numerical and musical domains in congenital amusics and; 3) the pattern of musical perception relatively preserved and compromised number sense in individuals with WS. Even though there may be processes of modularization for music cognitive system during the development, these processes could be shaped by natural selection to produce functionally organized results with particular evolutionary function.