Deborah Fu
Research Mentor(s): Anahita Mehta
Mentor Department: Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery
Authors: Deborah Fu, Carolyn Kroger, Mason Shields, Anahita Mehta
Session: Session 4 (1:00pm – 1:50pm)
Presentation Type: Oral
Abstract
According to the auditory grouping hypothesis, auditory stimuli sharing more similar features such as pitch and spatial location are more readily grouped together as part of a perceptual event or object. This hypothesis can account for perceptual phenomena whereby changes in one auditory feature distort judgements of a different feature. For example, the kappa effect is a bias in timing judgments among sequential sounds where those with more similar features are judged as occurring closer in time than more distinct sounds. Perceptual grouping also occurs based on higher-level contextual cues, such as for music, where listeners are better at identifying a target in a sequence of musical chords when it is more harmonically “distant†(e.g., in a different key) from the rest. The present study investigates whether musical harmony has similar biasing effects on timing judgments as lower-level cues such as pitch by testing for kappa effects in sequences of musical chords. Participants judged whether the second chord in each 3-chord sequence was closer in time to the first or third chord. Harmonically-similar chords that are subjectively judged as having better musical “fit†are predicted to be judged as occurring closer together in time than chords with worse harmonic fit.
