No abstract

Prior research has established that performance in short-term memory tasks using auditory rhythmic stimuli is frequently superior to that in tasks usingvisual stimuli, In fiveexperiments, the reasons for this were explored further. In a same-different task, pairs of brief rhythms were presented in which each rhythm was visual or auditory, resulting in two same-modality conditions and two cross-modality conditions. Three different rates of presentation were used. The results supported the temporal advantage of the auditory modality in short-term memory, which was quite robust at the quickest presentation rates. This advantage tended to decay as the presentation rate was slowed down, consistent with the view that, with time, the temporal patterns were being recoded into a more generic form.

Two well-established phenomena in temporal performance--preference for simple ratios over complex ratios and the ability to proportionately rescale temporal patterns--were examined together. Unlike the case with simple ratios, participants (3 trained musicians) showed only a limited ability to learn complex ratios and no ability to proportionately rescale them. These differences suggest that different mechanisms are used to produce the 2 ratio types. Systematic biases observed in the performances of the simple ratios (6 trained musicians) were modeled by assuming that an additive timing component, which is unequal for short and long intervals and changes with base rate, overlays a system that preferentially produces simple ratios. The general pattern of results was consistent with the view that rhythmic learning builds on or modifies a system of innate preferences.

The Wing-Kristofferson model (A. M. Wing & A. B. Kristofferson, (1973a, 1973b) decomposes the variance of isochronous finger tapping into 2 components: a central clock component and a peripheral motor component. The method assumes that there is no drift in the intertap intervals. A new method is introduced that further decomposes the clock component drift and drift-free clock variance. The method was studied through simulation and empirical analyses. Clock variance was the most prominent, followed by drift, and then motor variance. Individual and group differences were larger for the motor and drift variances than for the drift-free clock variance, so that group differences observed in the past may have been partially due to the failure to fully remove drift. The authors argue that the methods presented and extensions thereon show great promise in extending a method in wide use since 1973.

A B S T R AC T In the scaling of emotions in general, and their application to music in particular, the valence (good/bad) and activity or arousal dimensions are ubiquitous. Naive intuition and critics' writings have assumed a greater profundity in music's ability to express emotions than this would imply. Five experiments were performed to show that music is capable of expressing a greater detail in emotional range than can be captured by these two dimensions. The basic paradigm had participants rank order sets of emotions with respect to how well they applied to brief, unfamiliar instrumental selections. People did so rapidly, with significant reliability, even when the affective compass of the emotions to be ranked was restricted to enforce attention to subtle withindimension distinctions, or expanded to allow attention to subtle distinctions. K E Y