Trehub Sandra E, Hannon Erin E
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto at Mississauga, Ont., Canada.
Cognition. 2006 May;100(1):73-99. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2005.11.006. Epub 2005 Dec 27.
We review the literature on infants' perception of pitch and temporal patterns, relating it to comparable research with human adult and non-human listeners. Although there are parallels in relative pitch processing across age and species, there are notable differences. Infants accomplish such tasks with ease, but non-human listeners require extensive training to achieve very modest levels of performance. In general, human listeners process auditory sequences in a holistic manner, and non-human listeners focus on absolute aspects of individual tones. Temporal grouping processes and categorization on the basis of rhythm are evident in non-human listeners and in human infants and adults. Although synchronization to sound patterns is thought to be uniquely human, tapping to music, synchronous firefly flashing, and other cyclic behaviors can be described by similar mathematical principles. We conclude that infants' music perception skills are a product of general perceptual mechanisms that are neither music- nor species-specific. Along with general-purpose mechanisms for the perceptual foundations of music, we suggest unique motivational mechanisms that can account for the perpetuation of musical behavior in all human societies.
我们回顾了关于婴儿对音高和时间模式感知的文献，并将其与针对成年人类和非人类听众的类似研究进行关联。尽管在年龄和物种之间，相对音高处理存在相似之处，但也存在显著差异。婴儿轻松就能完成此类任务，而非人类听众则需要大量训练才能达到非常有限的表现水平。一般而言，人类听众以整体方式处理听觉序列，而非人类听众则专注于单个音调的绝对特征。非人类听众以及人类婴儿和成年人中都存在时间分组过程和基于节奏的分类。尽管与声音模式同步被认为是人类独有的，但随着音乐打节拍、萤火虫同步闪烁以及其他周期性行为都可以用类似的数学原理来描述。我们得出结论，婴儿的音乐感知技能是一般感知机制的产物，这些机制既不是特定于音乐的，也不是特定于物种的。除了音乐感知基础的通用机制外，我们还提出了独特的动机机制，这些机制可以解释音乐行为在所有人类社会中的延续。
