Slana Anka, Repovš Grega, Fitch W Tecumseh, Gingras Bruno
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Aškerčeva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Aškerčeva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2016 May;166:54-63. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2016.03.006. Epub 2016 Apr 6.
The context in which a stimulus is presented shapes the way it is processed. This effect has been studied extensively in the field of visual perception. Our understanding of how context affects the processing of auditory stimuli is, however, rather limited. Western music is primarily built on melodies (succession of pitches) typically accompanied by chords (harmonic context), which provides a natural template for the study of context effects in auditory processing. Here, we investigated whether pitch class equivalence judgments of tones are affected by the harmonic context within which the target tones are embedded. Nineteen musicians and 19 non-musicians completed a change detection task in which they were asked to determine whether two successively presented target tones, heard either in isolation or with a chordal accompaniment (same or different chords), belonged to the same pitch class. Both musicians and non-musicians were most accurate when the chords remained the same, less so in the absence of chordal accompaniment, and least when the chords differed between both target tones. Further analysis investigating possible mechanisms underpinning these effects of harmonic context on task performance revealed that both a change in gestalt (change in either chord or pitch class), as well as incongruency between change in target tone pitch class and change in chords, led to reduced accuracy and longer reaction times. Our results demonstrate that, similarly to visual processing, auditory processing is influenced by gestalt and congruency effects.
呈现刺激的背景会影响其被处理的方式。这种效应在视觉感知领域已得到广泛研究。然而，我们对背景如何影响听觉刺激处理的理解相当有限。西方音乐主要基于旋律（音高的连续），通常伴有和弦（和声背景），这为研究听觉处理中的背景效应提供了一个自然模板。在此，我们研究了目标音调所在的和声背景是否会影响音调的音级等效性判断。19名音乐家和19名非音乐家完成了一项变化检测任务，在该任务中，他们被要求判断两个相继呈现的目标音调，是单独听到还是伴有和弦伴奏（相同或不同和弦），是否属于同一音级。当和弦保持不变时，音乐家和非音乐家的判断最为准确；在没有和弦伴奏时，准确性稍低；当两个目标音调的和弦不同时，准确性最低。进一步分析探究和声背景对任务表现产生这些影响的可能机制，结果显示，格式塔的变化（和弦或音级的变化）以及目标音调音级变化与和弦变化之间的不一致，都会导致准确性降低和反应时间延长。我们的结果表明，与视觉处理类似，听觉处理也受格式塔和一致性效应的影响。
