Abstract
Pitch-height can be represented in a spatial format. Reaction times (RTs) to lower pitch-heights are faster when responses are executed in the lower side of space, whereas RTs to higher pitch-heights are faster when responses are executed in the upper side of space. This effect is called the Spatial-Music Association of Response Codes (SMARC) effect. We investigated how pitch-height and the brightness of a tone’s timbre might contribute in eliciting the SMARC effect as a function of music expertise by comparing the results of 24 musicians with the results we gathered previously (Pitteri et al., 2017) with 24 non-musicians. Three experimental conditions were used: pitch-height varied, brightness varied; pitch-height varied, brightness fixed; pitch-height fixed, brightness varied. We found that the coherent modulation of both pitch-height and brightness elicited the strongest SMARC effect, independently of music expertise. These results add evidence to the hypothesis that the strongest SMARC effect does not belong to pitch-height or brightness, but to pitch-height and brightness together.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank: Michele Scaltritti, Ph.D., for helping us with RTs analysis; Beatrice Barbazzeni, Camilla Santini, and Chiara Simonetto for their help in data gathering; all the participants for their time and effort. Also this study is dedicated to the beloved memory of our colleague and friend Mauro Marchetti. The elaborated data are freely available from the Open Science Framework at the following link: https://osf.io/djgkx/?view_only=ed15c5ed83924c9d8e1472a498d050ee. This work was carried out within the scope of the project ‘use-inspired basic research’, for which the Department of General Psychology of the University of Padova has been recognized as ‘Department of Excellence’ by the Italian Ministry of University and Research.
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The elaborated data are freely available from the Open Science Framework at the following link: https://osf.io/djgkx/?view_only=ed15c5ed83924c9d8e1472a498d050ee.
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Pitteri, M., Marchetti, M., Grassi, M. et al. Pitch height and brightness both contribute to elicit the SMARC effect: a replication study with expert musicians. Psychological Research 85, 2213–2222 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01395-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01395-0