Congenital amusia in its most common form is a disorder characterized by a musical pitch processing deficit. Although pitch is involved in conveying emotion in music, the implications for pitch deficits on musical emotion judgements is still under debate. Relatedly, both limited and spared musical emotion recognition was reported in amusia in conditions where emotion cues were not determined by musical mode or dissonance. Additionally, assumed links between musical abilities and visuo-spatial attention processes need further investigation in congenital amusics. Hence, we here test to what extent musical emotions can influence attentional performance. Fifteen congenital amusic adults and fifteen healthy controls matched for age and education were assessed in three attentional conditions: executive control (distractor inhibition), alerting, and orienting (spatial shift) while music expressing either joy, tenderness, sadness, or tension was presented. Visual target detection was in the normal range for both accuracy and response times in the amusic relative to the control participants. Moreover, in both groups, music exposure produced facilitating effects on selective attention that appeared to be driven by the arousal dimension of musical emotional content, with faster correct target detection during joyful compared to sad music. These findings corroborate the idea that pitch processing deficits related to congenital amusia do not impede other cognitive domains, particularly visual attention. Furthermore, our study uncovers an intact influence of music and its emotional content on the attentional abilities of amusic individuals. The results highlight the domain-selectivity of the pitch disorder in congenital amusia, which largely spares the development of visual attention and affective systems.

中文翻译：

---

先天性失忆症背景音乐情绪对注意力的影响

先天性失忆症最常见的形式是一种以音调处理缺陷为特征的疾病。尽管音高涉及在音乐中传达情感，但音高缺陷对音乐情感判断的影响仍在争论中。相关地，在情感线索不是由音乐模式或不和谐决定的情况下，在 amusia 中报告了有限和幸免的音乐情感识别。此外，音乐能力和视觉空间注意过程之间的假设联系需要对先天性音乐进行进一步研究。因此，我们在这里测试音乐情绪在多大程度上影响注意力表现。在三种注意力条件下评估了 15 名先天性无能成人和 15 名健康对照者的年龄和教育程度：执行控制（干扰抑制）、警觉、和定向（空间转移），同时呈现表达喜悦、温柔、悲伤或紧张的音乐。相对于控制参与者，视觉目标检测在 amusic 中的准确性和响应时间都在正常范围内。此外，在两组中，音乐暴露对选择性注意力产生了促进作用，这似乎是由音乐情感内容的唤醒维度驱动的，与悲伤音乐相比，在快乐期间更快地正确目标检测。这些发现证实了与先天性失忆症相关的音高处理缺陷不会妨碍其他认知领域，尤其是视觉注意力的观点。此外，我们的研究揭示了音乐及其情感内容对乐于助人的个体注意力能力的完整影响。