Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Saturday Noon Posters 4008–4015
sponse latencies in Experiments 3 and 4 showed entrainment to stimulus
rate, and repetition priming was modulated by tonal expectedness.
We discuss cognitive factors that can affect auditory repetition
priming.
(4008)
Is Categorical Perception of Musical Intervals a Short-Term
Memory Phenomenon? SINI E. MAURY, University of Helsinki, &
ELISABET M. SERVICE, University of Helsinki and Dalhousie University
(sponsored by Elisabet M. Service)—This study explores whether
categorical perception of musical intervals can vary as a function of
immediate memory load caused by interference from other sounds in
a sequence. In a two-interval same–different discrimination task, musicians
heard melodic intervals in isolation or embedded in four-note
sequences. Half of the interval pairs were similar, and half were derived
either from the same or from a different interval category. The
results showed that discriminability measured by d′ was significantly
higher for intervals straddling the category boundary. This effect was
even more pronounced when intervals formed a part of a melodic sequence.
This could mean that categorical perception is a short-term
memory phenomenon in which degraded auditory traces are repaired
with top-down categorical information. The results also imply that the
categorical information retrieved in the repair process takes the form
of the prototype of the category and is not general knowledge about
category membership.
(4009)
Musicians, Intermediate Musicians, and Nonmusicians’ Perception
of Bitonality. MAYUMI HAMAMOTO, MARGARET P. MUNGER,
& KYOTA KO, Davidson College—Bitonal music is characterized by
a dissonant “crunch” sound that had been believed to be clearly audible
by everyone (Wolpert, 2000). However, Wolpert found that nonmusicians
did not identify bitonality in a free response task. The present
study replicated Wolpert’s findings but also had participants rate
song clips for preference, correctness and pleasantness. Monotonal
music was rated higher on all dimensions, independently of the individual’s
level of musical training. In addition, following a brief training
session, nonmusicians (less than 1 year of musical training) identified
the tonality of the final clips at equivalently high rates as the intermediate
(mean, 2.4 years) and expert (mean, 9.2 years) musician groups.
(4010)
Cross-Modal Perception of Contour: The Role of Surface Correlation
and Fourier Analysis Similarity. JON B. PRINCE & MARK A.
SCHMUCKLER, University of Toronto, Scarborough—The perceived
similarity of cross-modally presented contours was investigated with
two experiments. The combination of surface correlation and Fourier
analysis techniques allows quantitative descriptions of both global and
local contour information. Experiment 1 investigated auditory–visual
similarity by presenting a tonal melody followed by a line drawing and
asking participants to rate the similarity between the two. Both stimuli
were coded as integer series representing pitch or vertical height,
respectively. Ratings were predicted by the surface correlation between
the melody and the drawing (the correlation of the two integer
series). Experiment 2 reversed the order of presentation by presenting
the drawing first, followed by the melody. Surface correlation again
predicted similarity ratings, in addition to amplitude and phase components
derived from a Fourier analysis model. These results validate
the Fourier analysis model of contour cross-modally, particularly
when participants must attend to the global character of visual and auditory
contours.
(4011)
Effect of Encoding Processes on Remembering Melodies. ESRA
MUNGAN & ZEHRA F. PEYNIRCIO ˇGLU, American University—
In this study, both musicians and nonmusicians were asked to study a
list of highly familiar melodies, using four different orienting tasks.
Two were conceptually driven (continuing the melody and judging the
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mood conveyed by the melody), and two were data driven (counting
the number of long notes and tracing the melodic shape). The study
phase was followed by an incidental free-choice recognition test.
Findings showed that for nonmusicians, conceptually driven orienting
tasks led to better memory performance than did data-driven orienting
tasks, whereas for musicians the reverse was true. These findings
are discussed within the transfer-appropriate-processing framework.
(4012)
The Relationship Between Emotions Expressed and Elicited by
Music and the Effect of Familiarity. OMAR ALI & ZEHRA F.
PEYNIRCIO ˇGLU, American University (sponsored by Zehra F. Peynircio
ˇglu)—We examined the effects of melodies on participants’ ratings
of emotionality. The intensity of the ratings was higher when participants
were asked to judge the emotion that was expressed by a melody
(i.e., how happy/sad/calm/angry is this music?) than when they were
asked to judge the emotion elicited by the same melody (i.e., how
happy/sad/calm/angry does this music make you feel?). This pattern
held across all four of the emotions and also even when the melodies
were made familiar through repetition. In addition, positive emotions
(i.e., happy and calm) were rated higher than negative emotions (i.e.,
sad and angry). Finally, for both types of ratings (i.e., conveying or
eliciting the emotion), the ratings in response to the repeated melodies
were higher, but only for the sad and calm emotions.
• EVENT COGNITION •
(4013)
Time Estimation and Fluency in Event Perception. MACKENZIE
GLAHOLT, AVA ELAHIPANAH, ANTHONY R. MCINTOSH, &
EYAL M. REINGOLD, University of Toronto, Mississauga—Intervals
in which familiar stimuli (e.g., words) are presented are judged as
longer than equal duration intervals in which unfamiliar stimuli are
presented (e.g., nonwords). This perceptual illusion may result from
the misattribution of the enhanced perceptual fluency associated with
processing familiar stimuli. We investigated whether a similar phenomenon
occurs in the perception of events. To manipulate event familiarity,
we used 2-sec video clips of collisions between hockey players,
played forward or in reverse. Reversed clips were closely matched
to forward clips in terms of low-level perceptual characteristics, but
they depicted events that violated physical laws and, as such, were unfamiliar.
Participants judged reverse clips as having shorter duration
and faster motion, as compared with forward clips. These findings
replicate and extend the findings with linguistic stimuli.
(4014)
From Seeing to Remembering Events in Time. SHULAN LU, Texas
A&M University, Commerce—Everyday events have beginnings, ends,
and intervals. These temporal parameters have different combinations,
and events have dynamic temporal trajectories. Previous research tends
to assume that events follow one another and that subevents occur
sometime in between. Recently, studies have begun to suggest that
people may make finer grained temporal links than we previously
thought. What kind of temporal properties get preserved more robustly?
Participants viewed animations of fish-swimming events, where test
events were embedded in a schema. For example, a group of fish chased
away other fish. In Experiment 1, participants made judgments about the
temporal relation of two given events immediately after they had viewed
each animation. In Experiment 2, participants made judgments after
viewing each animation and then drawing a maze for 25 sec. The results
showed that people did not remember the time interval that occurred between
two events but robustly preserved the overlap between events.
(4015)
Event Recognition in Free View and at an Eyeblink. REINHILD
GLANEMANN, CHRISTIAN DOBEL, & PIENIE ZWITSERLOOD,
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster—Recent studies demonstrated
that brief visual presentation (around 20 msec) of photoreal-