Infant Pitch and Timbre Discrimination in the Presence of Variation in the Other Dimension

Adult listeners perceive pitch with fine precision, with many adults capable of discriminating less than a 1 % change in fundamental frequency (F0). Although there is variability across individuals, this precise pitch perception is an ability ascribed to cortical functions that are also important for speech and music perception. Infants display neural immaturity in the auditory cortex, suggesting that pitch discrimination may improve throughout infancy. In two experiments, we tested the limits of F0 (pitch) and spectral centroid (timbre) perception in 66 infants and 31 adults. Contrary to expectations, we found that infants at both 3 and 7 months were able to reliably detect small changes in F0 in the presence of random variations in spectral content, and vice versa, to the extent that their performance matched that of adults with musical training and exceeded that of adults without musical training. The results indicate high fidelity of F0 and spectral-envelope coding in infants, implying that fully mature cortical processing is not necessary for accurate discrimination of these features. The surprising difference in performance between infants and musically untrained adults may reflect a developmental trajectory for learning natural statistical covariations between pitch and timbre that improves coding efficiency but results in degraded performance in adults without musical training when expectations for such covariations are violated.