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Detecting perturbations in polyrhythms: effects of complexity and attentional strategies

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Abstract

Jones et al. in Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception and Performance 21:293–307, 1995, showed that a temporal perturbation is easier to detect in a 3:2 polyrhythm than in a single-stream isochronous baseline condition if the two isochronous pulse streams forming the polyrhythm are perceptually integrated: integration creates shorter inter-onset interval (IOI) durations that facilitate perturbation detection. The present study examined whether this benefit of integration outweighs the potential costs imposed by the greater IOI heterogeneity and memory demands of more complex polyrhythms. In "Experiment 1", musically trained participants tried to detect perturbations in 3:5, 4:5, 6:5, and 7:5 polyrhythms having one of two different pitch separations between pulse streams, as well as in an isochronous baseline condition. "Experiment 2" included an additional 2:5 polyrhythm, additional pitch separations, and instructions to integrate or segregate the two pulse streams. In both experiments, perturbation detection scores for polyrhythms were below baseline, decreased as polyrhythm complexity increased, and tended to be lower at a smaller pitch separation, with little effect of instructions. Clearly, polyrhythm complexity was the main determinant of detection performance, which is attributed to the interval heterogeneity and/or memory demands of the pattern formed by the integrated pulse streams. In this task, perceptual integration was disadvantageous, but apparently could not be avoided.

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Notes

  1. As it is generally believed that attentional strategies affect the subjective perception of multi-stream stimuli between the fission and temporal coherence boundaries (Bregman, 1990; Van Noorden, 1975), it is likely that the participants would have judged the stimuli to be more integrated (segregated) when they had been instructed to integrate (segregate) them. Therefore, the results suggest that detection performance depended more on objective stimulus properties than on subjective impressions of integration/segregation (which were not assessed).

  2. It might seem that this statement should be qualified by adding “unless the first tone in the polyrhythm cycle is perturbed” because that tone is surrounded by 450-ms IOIs, like the tones in the four-pulse stream. In fact, however, perturbation of the first tone in either stream should be easy to detect because it changes the synchrony of the two cycle-initial tones into an asynchrony. Thus, this perturbation would not be detected on the basis of a change in the adjacent IOIs, but on the basis of asynchrony.

  3. Occasionally, a true false alarm may have been scored as a hit, or a very slow response to a perturbation may have been considered a false alarm. The wide window was justified by the fact that participants were likely to respond to the change in the shorter of the two consecutive IOIs that were affected by a shifted tone. If the shorter IOI was the second one, the response was actually triggered by the next tone, resulting in a longer RT.

  4. The response window for hits was 1200 − 150 = 1,050-ms long. The response windows of the eight perturbations thus occupied 8 × 1,050 = 8,400 ms in 17 cycles of 2504 ms duration each, or 19.7% of the total time of 17 × 2,504 = 42,568 ms. (Participants did not know that perturbations occurred only in even-numbered cycles, only that they could not occur in the first three cycles.)

  5. Individual differences were very large, with average hit percentages ranging from 14.2% (the omitted participant) to 87.9%. BHR achieved 55.3%.

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Acknowledgments

This paper is based on a senior thesis submitted by BCF to the Department of Music at Yale University in May of 2011, supervised by EP. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation Grant BCS-0924206 to BHR. Address correspondence to Bruno H. Repp, Haskins Laboratories, 300 George Street, New Haven, CT 06511-6624, USA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Brian C. Fidali & Ève Poudrier

  2. Haskins Laboratories, 300 George Street, New Haven, CT, 06511-6624, USA

    Bruno H. Repp

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  1. Brian C. Fidali
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  2. Ève Poudrier
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  3. Bruno H. Repp
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Correspondence to Bruno H. Repp.

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Fidali, B.C., Poudrier, È. & Repp, B.H. Detecting perturbations in polyrhythms: effects of complexity and attentional strategies. Psychological Research 77, 183–195 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-011-0406-8

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