Melodic pitch changes shorten rather than lengthen N1m peak latency in auditory cortex

Evidence

Both panels of Fig. 2 also show that the N1m peak occurs earlier in the melodic TR (blue), whereas one might have thought that it would take longer to produce a melodic response than a tonic response (latency diffpassive = 25. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4703

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Counterintuitive timing: the physiological network fires faster for melodic sequences despite the presumably greater computational load — a non-obvious result worth sitting with.
• XREF: Recalls the established finding that N1m latency is among the most precise, reliable MEG statistics, making these offsets meaningful.