Abstract
Listeners succeeded in following a melody interleaved at 6 or 8 notes/sec with distractor notes in the same pitch range and of the same timbre. Their ability to perform this auditory “hidden-figures” task depended on the rhythmic control of attention on the basis of expectancies dew, loped through perceptual learning with melodies in the listeners’ culture. Listeners appear to have aimed expectancies in pitch and time at regions where events critical to the identification of melodies are likely to occur—regions defining “expectancy windows” through which target notes are perceived. Events in pitch and time regions outside these expectancy windows were not perceived as accurately as events within the window. Listeners discerned interleaved melodies whose notes fellon the consistent temporal beat of a pattern better than they did melodies whose notes fell off the beat. Expectancies could also be aimedoffthe beat: expected target notes occurringoff the beat in a syncopated rhythm were judged more accurately than unexpected notes occurringon the beat. Listeners found it more difficult to judge the pitch of target notes that fell outside the expected pitch region than that of notes within the expected region. The interleaved distractor notes appear to be instrumental in narrowing attention to within the expectancy windows. When the interleaved distractors were removed, unexpected notes becamemore salient than expected ones.
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Several of these experiments formed a part of master’s theses completed by the junior authors under the senior author’s direction Preliminary reports were presented to the Psychonomic Society, San Antonio, November 1984, and Boston, November 1985; to the Conference on Mind, Body, and the Performing Arts, New York University, July 1985; and to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Philadelphia, May 1986.
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Dowling, W.J., Lung, K.MT. & Herrbold, S. Aiming attention in pitch and time in the perception of interleaved melodies. Perception & Psychophysics 41, 642–656 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210496
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210496