Department of Music, Yale University, 469 College St, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.
Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine, 230 S Frontage Rd, New Haven, CT 06519, USA; Department of Psychology, Yale University, 405 Temple St, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.
Cognition. 2023 Nov;240:105601. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105601. Epub 2023 Aug 19.
Humans make predictions about future events in many domains, including when they listen to music. Previous accounts of harmonic expectation in music have emphasised the role of implicit musical knowledge acquired in the long term through the mechanism of statistical learning. However, it is not known whether listeners can adapt their expectations for unusual harmonies in the short term through repetition priming, and whether the extent of any short-term adaptation depends on the unfolding statistical structure of the music. To explore these possibilities, we presented 150 participants with phrases from Bach chorales that ended with a cadence that was either a priori likely or unlikely based on the long-term statistical structure of the corpus of chorales. While holding the 50-50 incidence of likely vs. unlikely cadences constant, we manipulated the order in which these phrases were presented such that the local probability of hearing an unlikely cadence changed throughout the experiment. For each phrase, participants provided two judgements: (a) a prospective rating of how confident they were in their expectations for the cadence, and (b) a retrospective rating of how well the presented cadence matched their expectations. While confidence ratings increased over the course of the experiment, the rate of change decreased as the local probability of an unexpected cadence increased. Participants' expectations favoured likely cadences over unlikely cadences on average, but their expectation ratings for unlikely cadences increased at a faster rate over the course of the experiment than for likely cadences, particularly when the local probability of hearing an unlikely cadence was high. Thus, despite entrenched long-term statistics about cadences, listeners can indeed adapt to unusual musical harmonies and are sensitive to the local statistical structure of the musical environment. We suggest that this adaptation is an instance of Bayesian belief updating, a domain-general process that accounts for expectation adaptation in multiple domains.
人类在许多领域都会对未来事件做出预测，包括在听音乐时。之前关于音乐中和谐期望的研究强调了通过统计学习机制长期获得的隐含音乐知识的作用。然而，目前还不清楚听众是否可以通过重复启动来短期调整对不寻常和声的期望，以及任何短期适应的程度是否取决于音乐的展开统计结构。为了探索这些可能性，我们向 150 名参与者展示了巴赫康塔塔中的短语，这些短语以终止和弦结束，终止和弦根据康塔塔语料库的长期统计结构要么是先验可能的，要么是不可能的。在保持可能的终止和弦与不可能的终止和弦的 50-50 发生率不变的情况下，我们操纵了这些短语呈现的顺序，使得在整个实验过程中听到不可能终止和弦的局部概率发生变化。对于每个短语，参与者提供了两个判断：（a）对他们对终止和弦的期望的信心程度的前瞻性评价，以及（b）对呈现的终止和弦与他们的期望的匹配程度的回顾性评价。虽然信心评分随着实验的进行而增加，但随着意外终止和弦的局部概率增加，变化率降低。参与者的期望平均倾向于可能的终止和弦而不是不可能的终止和弦，但他们对不可能的终止和弦的期望评分在实验过程中的增加速度快于可能的终止和弦，尤其是当听到不可能的终止和弦的局部概率较高时。因此，尽管有关于终止和弦的根深蒂固的长期统计数据，但听众确实可以适应不寻常的音乐和声，并且对音乐环境的局部统计结构敏感。我们认为这种适应是贝叶斯信念更新的一个实例，贝叶斯信念更新是一种解释多个领域期望适应的领域一般性过程。
