Harmonic priming in an amusic patient: The power of implicit tasks

Our study investigated with an implicit method ( i.e., priming paradigm) whether I. R. – a brain-damaged patient exhibiting severe amusia – processes implicitly musical structures. The task consisted in identifying one of two phonemes ( Experiment 1) or timbres ( Experiment 2) on the last chord of eight-chord sequences (i. e., target). The targets were harmonically related or less related to the prior chords. I. R. displayed harmonic priming effects: Phoneme and timbre identification was faster for related than for less related targets ( Experiments 1 and 2). However, I. R.’s explicit judgements of completion for the same sequences did not differ between related and less related contexts ( Experiment 3). Her impaired performance in explicit judgements was not due to general difficulties with task demands since she performed like controls for completion judgements on spoken sentences ( Experiment 4). The findings indicate that implicit knowledge of musical structures might remain intact and accessible, even when explicit judgements and overt recognition have been lost.