It's About Time: Foreword

It's About Time: Music as a Cognitive Skill

Symposium within the Fourth Conference of the Australasian Cognitive Science Society

Symposium Convenor: Kate Stevens (kj.stevens@uws.edu.au)

Overview

The complex, temporal, hierarchical structure of music and the way in which music is perceived and cognized can inform our understanding of a range of general psychological processes. Seemingly esoteric, music as an auditory pattern, is ubiquitous: Sundberg & Verrillo (1992) have noted that nearly 100% of the world's population enjoys listening to some kind of music. Research questions which consider the way music is perceived, cognized, recognized, recalled, created, composed, and performed, are at the very heart of psychological inquiry.

In this Symposium we consider music as a cognitive skill. The first two papers focus on the temporal properties of musical patterns and examine the representation and processing of time and rhythm. Judith Sheridan and J. Devin McAuley examine the timing accuracy of children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) as they performed a rhythmic tapping task. Compared with age-matched and college-age controls, young children with ASD were more variable than age-matched controls. Tapping variance was decomposed into clock and motor-delay estimates. Poor performance by the ASD group was attributed to an increase in clock variance; there were no differences in motor-delay estimates for the children with and without ASD. Sheridan & McAuley interpret the results as support for the cascade model of ASD proposed by Courchesne et al (1989) which links neuro-developmental dysfunction with deficits in timing.

Peter Keller argues for and develops two distinct measures of processing and representational efficiency. Metrical and non-metrical patterns are compared: inspection time and interference effects are used as indices of processing efficiency whereas the effect of contextual cues to meter on memory is used to measure representational efficiency. Keller demonstrates that metrical patterns are processed and represented more efficiently than non-metrical patterns and concludes that metric frameworks function adaptively facilitating real-time music interactions.

Methods for measuring cognitive complexity are reviewed by Jeffrey Pressing with an emphasis on the structure of musical patterns. Pressing outlines a range of techniques for measuring complexity including the use of nonlinear dynamical indicators and measures of maximum likelihood. Although the examples are borrowed from the music domain it is evident from Pressing's analyses of structural and temporal complexity that the application of these measures and the related prediction of behavioural consequences is not limited to the music or acoustic domain.

The final paper in the series (Stevens, McAuley & Humphreys) examines memory for multidimensional musical patterns and addresses the integration of relational information such as melody and text. Stevens et al., draw on general theories and experimental paradigms gleaned from memory research in an effort to explain seemingly conflicting data. Using an episodic memory paradigm and the relational information hypothesis of Humphreys (1976), the authors demonstrate that the evidence of an integrated memory representation for melody and text is more suggestive of a conjunctive or associative memory. The new conceptualisation of the relational properties of musical memory provides an important link between music and more traditional language-based studies of human memory.

References

Courchesne, E. (1989). Neuroanatomical systems involved in infantile autism: The implications of cerebellar abnormalities. In G. Dawson (Ed.), Autism: Nature, diagnosis and treatment (pp. 119-143). New York: Guilford Press.

Humphreys, M. S. (1976). Relational information and the context effect in recognition memory. Memory & Cognition, 4, 221-232.

Sundberg, J., & Verrillo, R. T. (1992). Somatosensory feedback in musical performance: Editorial. Music Perception, 9, 277-280.