Musical Meter Directs the Hierarchical Allocation of Attention in Time
Ahren Fitzroy, Lisa D. Sanders – Neuroscience and Behavior Program, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Poster
presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience
Society, Montreal, QC
Download high-resolution .pdf of poster
Abstract:
When perceptual systems are overwhelmed by information changing rapidly,
listeners can use temporally selective attention to preferentially
process the most critical information. Event-related brain potential
(ERP) research has shown that temporally selective attention affects
early perceptual processing as indexed by the amplitude of the first
negative peak 100 ms after sound onset (N1) in a manner similar to that
observed for auditory spatially selective attention. Further, the
difference in ERPs elicited by sounds at attended and unattended times
is larger when the attended time is cued by an isochronous pulse rather
than explicit instruction alone. These findings are consistent with
entrainment models of dynamic attending that propose attentional
resources fluctuate, phase-locked to external rhythms. Entrainment
models also predict that hierarchically organized exogenous rhythms will
induce a hierarchical distribution of attention across time; the
current study employed the hierarchical rhythmic structure found in
Western music to test this hypothesis. Auditory evoked potentials
elicited by physically identical stimuli presented at times of relative
strength and weakness in the metric hierarchies of short melodies were
compared in musicians and musically naïve individuals. Sounds presented
at points of metric strength elicited larger amplitude N1s than the same
sounds presented at points of metric weakness. This result suggests
that multiple exogenous periodicities induce a hierarchical allocation
of temporally selective attention without explicit instruction and
provides electrophysiological support for entrainment models of dynamic
attending.
Stimuli presented on poster:
Ex. 1 – Duple, isochronous, slow
Ex. 2 – Duple, patterned, fast
Ex. 3 – Triple, patterned, slow
Ex. 4 – Triple, isochronous, fast |