Marilyn Gail Boltz

Dynamic attending and responses to time

A temporally based theory of attending is proposed that assumes that the structure of world events affords different attending modes. Future-oriented attending supports anticipatory behaviors and occurs with highly coherent temporal events. Time judgments, given this attending mode, axe influenced by the way an events ending confirms or violates temporal expectancies. Analytic attending supports other activities (e.g., grouping, counting), and if it occurs with events of low temporal coherence, then time judgments depend on the attending levels involved. A weighted contrast model describes over- and underestimations of event durations. The model applies to comparative duration judgments of equal and unequal time intervals; its rationale extends to temporal productions/extrapolations. Two experiments compare predictions of the contrast model with those derived from other traditional approaches. One characteristic of modern society is a preoccupation with fixed time schedules and standardized timekeepers. We maintain appointments at hourly intervals, rush to meet the 5:00 p.m. bus, and dine at predetermined hours. Yet our natural ability to judge time remains poorly understood. How often do we estimate the time elapsed since last glancing at a clock and discover with surprise that we were fairly accurate? Surprise is understandable because at least as often we lose track of time and err. The validity of these impressions is confirmed by laboratory research showing that duration judgments depend not only on actual physical duration but also on a variety of non

Controlled attending as a function of melodic and temporal context

Melodic and rhythmic context were systematically varied in a pattern recognition task involving pairs (standard-comparison) of nine-tone auditory sequences. The experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that rhythmic context can direct attention toward or away from tones which instantiate higher order melodic rules. Three levels of melodic structure (one, two, no higher order rules) were crossed with four levels of rhythm [isochronous, dactyl (A U U), anapest (U U A), irregular]. Rhythms were designed to shift accent locations on three centrally embedded tones. Listeners were more accurate in detecting violations of higher order melodic rules when the rhythmic context induced accents on tones which instantiated these rules. Effects are discussed in terms of attentional rhythmicity.

Effects of background music on the remembering of filmed events

The use of background music within films provides a naturalistic setting in which to investigate certain issues of schematic processing. Here, the relative placement of music was manipulated such that music either accompanied a scene’s outcome, and thereby accentuated its affective meaning, or foreshadowed the same scene, and thereby created expectancies about the future course of events. In addition, background music was either congruent or incongruent with the affect of an episode’s outcome. When subjects were later asked to recall the series of filmed episodes, results showed that expectancy violations arising from mood-incongruent relations led to better memory in the foreshadowing condition, while mood-congruent relations led to better performance in the accompanying condition. Results from a recognition task further revealed that scenes unavailable for recall could be recognized when cued by background music. These overall findings are discussed in terms of selective-attending processes that are differentially directed as a function of background music.

Attentional processes in time perception: Effects of mental workload and event structure.

The role of attention in timing was evaluated in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, participants reproduced the durations of melodies with either a coherent or an incoherent structure. Participants were tested under control (timing only) and detection (timing plus target detection) workload conditions. Reproductions were shorter and more inaccurate under detection conditions, and incoherent event structure extended the effect to a wider range of durations. In Experiment 2, participants reproduced the durations of auditory prose passages that represented 3 levels of mental workload and 3 levels of event structure. Both increases in workload and the degradation of structure led to inaccurate reproductions. The results point to the central role of attention in temporal experience.

The generation of temporal and melodic expectancies during musical listening

When listening to a melody, we are often able to anticipate not onlywhat tonal intervals will occur next but alsowhen in time these will appear. The experiments reported here were carried out to investigate what types of structural relations support the generation of temporal expectancies in the context of a melody recognition task. The strategy was to present subjects with a set of folk tunes in which temporal accents (i.e., notes with a prolonged duration) always occurred in the first half of a melody, so that expectancies, if generated, could carry over to an isochronous sequence of notes in the latter half ofthe melody. The ability to detect deviant pitch changes in the final variation as a function of rhythmic context was then evaluated. Accuracy and reaction time data from Experiment 1 indicated that expectancy formation jointly depends on an invariant periodicity of temporal accentuation and the attentional highlighting ofcertain melodic relations (i.e., phrase ending points). In Experiment 2, once these joint expectancies were generated, the temporal dimension had a greater facilitating effectupon melody recognition than did the melodic one. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for the perceptual processing of musical events.

Harmonic and rhythmic influences on musical expectancy

The effects of harmony and rhythm on expectancy formation were studied in two experiments. In both studies, we generated musical passages consisting of a melodic line accompanied by four harmonic (chord) events. These sequences varied in their harmonic content, the rhythmic periodicity of the three context chords prior to the final chord, and the ending time of the final chord itself. In Experiment 1, listeners provided ratings for how well the final chord in a chord sequence fit their expectations for what was to come next; analyses revealed subtle changes in ratings as a function of both harmonic and rhythmic variation. Experiment 2 extended these results; listeners made a speeded reaction time judgment on whether the final chord of a sequence belonged with its set of context chords. Analysis of the reaction time data suggested that harmonic and rhythmic variation also influenced the speed of musical processing. These results are interpreted with reference to current models of music cognition, and they highlight the need for rhythmical weighting factors within the psychological representation of tonal/pitch information.

The cognitive processing of film and musical soundtracks

Previous research has demonstrated that musical soundtracks can influence the interpretation, emotional impact, and remembering of film information. The intent here was to examine how music is encoded into the cognitive system and subsequently represented relative to its accompanying visual action. In Experiment 1, participants viewed a set of music/film clips that were either congruent or incongruent in their emotional affects. Selective attending was also systematically manipulated by instructing viewers to attend to and remember the music, film, or both in tandem. The results from tune recognition, film recall, and paired discrimination tasks collectively revealed that mood-congruent pairs lead to a joint encoding of music/film information as well as an integrated memory code. Incongruent pairs, on the other hand, result in an independent encoding in which a given dimension, music or film, is only remembered well if it was selectively attended to at the time of encoding. Experiment 2 extended these findings by showing that tunes from mood-congruent pairs are better recognized when cued by their original scenes, while those from incongruent pairs are better remembered in the absence of scene information. These findings both support and extend the “Congruence Associationist Model” (A. J. Cohen, 2001), which addresses those cognitive mechanisms involved in the processing of music/film information.

Effects of event structure on retrospective duration judgments

Two experiments examined whether varying degrees of event coherence influence the remembering of an event’s actual duration. Relying on musical compositions (Experiment 1) or filmed narratives (Experiment 2) as experimental stimuli, the underlying hierarchy of information within events (i.e., melodic intervals or story elements) was either attentionally highlighted or obscured by placing a varying number of accents (i.e., prolonged notes or commercial breaks) at locations that either coincided or conflicted with grammatical phrase boundaries. When subjects were unexpectedly asked to judge the actual duration of events, through a reproduction (Experiment 1) or verbal estimation (Experiment 2) task, duration estimates became more accurate and less variable when the pattern of accentuation increasingly outlined the events’ nested relationships. Conversely, when the events’ organization was increasingly obscured through accentuation, time judgments not only became less accurate and more variable, but were consistently overestimated. These findings support a theoretical framework emphasizing the effects of event structure on attending and remembering activities.

Rhythm and “good endings”: Effects of temporal structure on tonality judgments

The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate the influence of rhythmic structure on the perception of tonal relationships marking the end of a melody. Musically sophisticated listeners were asked to rate the degree of resolution in a set of folk tunes that varied in their tonal ending and temporal accent structure. The results indicated that melodies ending on the leading tone-to-tonic progression were judged the most complete, while the least complete were those leaving a listener “hanging” by ending on the leading tone note. These ratings, however, were influenced by the temporal accent structure of a tune. The highest degree of resolution was observed for melodies that ended “on time” through an invariant pattern of temporal/melodic accents. Accent structures that led to endings occurring earlier or later than expected resulted in significantly lower resolution ratings. The present results illustrate the need to incorporate dynamic pattern influences into models of tonal perception.

Some structural determinants of melody recall

Sophisticated musicians were asked to recall, using musical notation, a set of unfamiliar folk tunes that varied in rhythmic structure and referents of tonality. The results showed that memory was facilitated by tonic triad members marking phrase endings, but only when their presence was highlighted by a corresponding pattern of temporal accents. Conversely, recall significantly declined when tonal information was either absent or obscured by rhythmic structure. Error analyses further revealed that the retention of overall pitch contour and information at phrase ending points varied as a function of these manipulations. The results are discussed in terms of a framework that links the acts of perceiving and remembering to a common attentional scheme.