Pitch perception and retention: Two cumulative benefits of selective attention

Abstract

By presenting, before a "chord" of three pure tones with remote frequencies, a tone relatively close in frequency to one component (T1) of the chord, one can direct the listener's attention onto T1 within the chord. In the first part of the present study, it was found that this increases the accuracy with which the pitch of T1 is perceived. The attentional cue improved the discrimination between the frequency of T1 and that of another tone (T2) presented immediately after the chord or very shortly (300 msec) after it. No improvement was found when T1 was presented alone instead of within a chord. A subsequent experiment, in which the chord and T2 were separated by either 300 msec or 4 sec, indicated that the attentional cue improved not only the perception, but also the memorization of the pitch of T1 (especially when T1 was the intermediate component of the chord). It is argued that the positive effect of attention on memory took place when the pitch percept was encoded into memory, rather than after the formation of the pitch memory trace.

The effect of stimulus range on two-interval frequency discrimination

“…Although it is possible that participants use a strategy like that outlined by Amitay et al, the present data necessitate the assumption that even slight widening of the attentional band leads to a dramatic loss of resolution. Thus, while it is undoubtedly the case that attention is an important determinant of frequency discrimination (e.g., Demany et al, 2004), it is difficult to develop a convincing attention-based explanation for the current findings.…”

Release from interference in auditory working memory for pitch

“…Active retention of a specific percept within a designated short-term memory store (e.g., pitch storage module) is thought to be under the purview of the attention-based processes of working memory (e.g., Cowan et al, 2005;Demany et al, 2004;Deutsch, 1978aDeutsch, , 1999Engle et al, 1999). It has been theorized that percepts for specific auditory traits (e.g., pitch, loudness, duration) are stored in semiautonomous parallel arrays whose information is recombined upon retrieval (Deutsch, 1999) and using spatial separation across sequential tones to disassociate one tonal percept from another (Deutsch, 1978a,b;Kallman et al, 1987).…”

The role of auditory memory traces in attention to frequency

“…It is interesting to note that there is some previous evidence to suggest that voluntary rehearsal of the frequency of a tone over a silent delay of several seconds does not aid performance in a frequency discrimination task (Keller & Cowan, 1994; see also Demany, Montandon, & Semal, 2004). Green and McKeown (2001) suggested that their finding of wider attention bands for informative rather than uninformative cues might arise from a rehearsal process that, while maintaining the strength of the memory trace, serves to blur the representation of accurate frequency information, due to the operation of positive feedback loops between different cortical areas.…”