Conceptual and perceptual information both influence melody identification

Abstract

Three processes have been identified as central to object identification: top-down processing, bottom-up processing, and lateral competition. Six experiments using the perceptual interference paradigm were conducted to assess the relative contributions of these three processes to melody identification. Significant interference was observed only when the target and the distracting information were difficult to distinguish both perceptually and conceptually. Lateral competition-the activation of specific distractor melodies-did not influence the magnitude of interference observed. These results suggest that bottom-up and top-down processes contribute more to melody identification than does lateral competition. The data are discussed in terms of the broader literature on object identification and the relationship between identifying melodies, spoken words, and visual objects.

Serial processing in melody identification and the organization of musical semantic memory

“…For example, Halpern (1984) found that listeners could organize a set of familiar tunes more easily and coherently according to semantic characteristics like genre than they could according to musical characteristics like initial interval, mode, or rhythm. The large number of genre-based confusion errors observed in Experiment 2 is consistent with the pattern reported by Halpern and also supports the claim that conceptual information influences melody identification (Schulkind, 2004). That is, the data suggest that low-level perceptual information activated superordinate categorical information that the listener used to generate a response.…”

“…This effect is quite general, having been observed with photographic images (Bruner & Potter, 1964), line drawings (Lindfield & Wingfield, 1999;Lindfield, Wingfield, & Bowles, 1994;Luo & Snodgrass, 1994;Schulkind, 2000;Snodgrass & Hirshman, 1991), visually presented words (Peynircioǧlu, 1987(Peynircioǧlu, , 1990Peynircioǧlu & Watkins, 1986), aurally presented words (Gibson & Watkins, 1991), and aurally presented familiar melodies (Schulkind, 2000(Schulkind, , 2002(Schulkind, , 2004. Most experiments compare performance across two conditions, labeled fixed and ascending.…”

“…The two ascending conditions differed in terms of which notes were presented for each trial. The forward condition was identical to what has been called ascending presentation in previous studies (Schulkind, 2000(Schulkind, , 2002(Schulkind, , 2004; the first exposure consisted of the first two notes of the melody; the second consisted of the first three notes, and so on (see Figure 1). As its name implies, the notes heard in the random ascending condition were selected randomly, starting with two notes, and adding a new randomly selected note at each successive exposure; silent intervals replaced the notes that were not selected (see Figure 1).…”

“…For example, whereas presenting a subject with the name of a distractor does not influence the identification of line drawings (Snodgrass & Hirshman, 1991), such a manipulation reliably decreases the identification of familiar melodies (Schulkind, 2002). Furthermore, lateral competition-interference caused by nontarget foils (e.g., knowledge of "dog" interferes with identifying "cat")-is a central component of most theories of visual object and spoken word identification (Jusczyk & Luce, 2002) but does not appear to play a role in melody identification (Schulkind, 2004).…”

“…The present study evaluated the significance of initial segments for melody identification using the partial exposure interference (PEI) paradigm (Schulkind, 2004). Briefly, the subjects' task was to identify highly familiar melodies based on a limited number of notes.…”