The dynamics of attending: How people track time-varying events.

Abstract

A theory of attentional dynamics is proposed and aimed at explaining how listeners respond to systematic change in everyday events while retaining a general sense of their rhythmic structure. The approach describes attending as the behavior of internal oscillations, called attending rhythms, that are capable of entraining to external events and targeting attentional energy to expected points in time. A mathematical formulation of the theory describes internal oscillations that focus pulses of attending energy and interact in various ways to enable attentional tracking of events with complex rhythms. This approach provides reliable predictions about the role of attending to event time structure in rhythmical events that modulate in rate, as demonstrated in 3 listening experiments.Virtually all things in one's environment have extension in time, some too brief to be perceptible and others too long to be imagined. Everyday events, however, occur at time scales over which one can attend. When people hear friends engage in a conversation or listen to a familiar tune, when they watch a basketball game, or when they observe a mother-infant exchange, they are engaged by temporally patterned changes occasioned by natural forces. Such events comprise actions and movements that display distinct beginnings, recognizable rhythms, characteristic tempos, and lawful endings (e.g.

Perceiving temporal regularity in music

“…The current model draws upon earlier work (Large & Kolen, 1994;Large & Jones, 1999) with the important distinction that it combines previous notions of a temporal receptive field (the sensitive region) and an attentional pulse (which determines the perceptual noticeability of temporal fluctuations), using the notion of an expectancy function. The model is a mathematical simplification of Large's (2000a) model, and it addresses beat-tracking in the challenging case of temporally fluctuating music performance.…”

“…Thus, we assume the metrical structure and initial beat period, which are inferred in Large's (2000a) more complete continuous time model. The discrete-time formulation is used here because it offers several advantages compared to its continuous-time cousin; it is economical, and predictions concerning time difference judgements have been fully worked out for this model (Large & Jones, 1999). In this section, we begin by describing the dynamics of a single oscillator, and then describe the coupling of multiple oscillators.…”

“…Next we define the model's expectancy for when an event will occur, termed the attentional pulse by Large and Jones (1999). The attentional pulse is modeled as a periodic probability density function, the von Mises distribution, which is shaped similarly to a Gaussian distribution but defined on the circle (i.e., phase).…”

“…When driven by musical rhythms, such oscillations phase-lock to the external musical events. Previous work has shown this framework to provide both flexibility in tracking temporally fluctuating rhythms (Large & Kolen, 1994;Large, 1996) and a concurrent ability to discriminate temporal deviations (Large & Jones, 1999). In the current study, we extend this framework to a more natural and complex case that provides a robust test of the model: multivoiced music performances that contain large temporal fluctuations.…”

“…n is a focus or concentration parameter that determines the extent of an expectancy function, as shown in Fig. 2B (termed a pulse of attentional energy by Large & Jones, 1999). It models the degree of expectancy for the occurrence of events near ϭ 0.…”