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Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Psychology

What Do Less Accurate Singers Remember? Pitch-Matching Ability And Long-Term Memory For Music, Andrea Halpern, Peter Q. Pfordresher Jan 2022

What Do Less Accurate Singers Remember? Pitch-Matching Ability And Long-Term Memory For Music, Andrea Halpern, Peter Q. Pfordresher

Faculty Journal Articles

We have only a partial understanding of how people remember nonverbal information such as melodies. Although once learned, melodies can be retained well over long periods of time, remembering newly presented melodies is on average quite difficult. People vary considerably, however, in their level of success in both memory situations. Here, we examine a skill we anticipated would be correlated with memory for melodies: the ability to accurately reproduce pitches. Such a correlation would constitute evidence that melodic memory involves at least covert sensorimotor codes. Experiment 1 looked at episodic memory for new melodies among non-musicians, both overall and with …


Mood Judgments And Memory For Tunes: A Special Case Of Levels Of Processing?, Andrea Halpern, Esra Mungan, Zehra F. Peynircioğlu Jan 2021

Mood Judgments And Memory For Tunes: A Special Case Of Levels Of Processing?, Andrea Halpern, Esra Mungan, Zehra F. Peynircioğlu

Faculty Journal Articles

Although levels of processing (LOP) effects are well-established in memory research, beneficial effects of “deep” orienting tasks have rarely been reported in studies of tune memory. Our prior work implicated mood judgments as one candidate for a beneficial orienting task. The current series explored both the robustness and potential explanations for that enhancement. In four experiments, we varied type of processing tasks (including mood and other putatively deep/conceptual and shallow/ perceptual tasks) and the familiarity of the tunes in a recognition paradigm, which included “remember/know” judgments. Experiment 1, with low-familiarity tunes, revealed a LOP effect for two conceptual (mood, continuation) …


Mapping Specific Mental Content During Musical Imagery, Mor Regev, Andrea Halpern, Adrian Owen, Aniruddh Patel, Robert J. Zatorre Jan 2021

Mapping Specific Mental Content During Musical Imagery, Mor Regev, Andrea Halpern, Adrian Owen, Aniruddh Patel, Robert J. Zatorre

Faculty Journal Articles

Humans can mentally represent auditory information without an external stimulus, but the specificity of these internal representations remains unclear. Here, we asked how similar the temporally unfolding neural representations of imagined music are compared to those during the original perceived experience. We also tested whether rhythmic motion can influence the neural representation of music during imagery as during perception. Participants first memorized six 1-min-long instrumental musical pieces with high accuracy. Functional MRI data were collected during: 1) silent imagery of melodies to the beat of a visual metronome; 2) same but while tapping to the beat; and 3) passive listening. …


Technical Report 2019-01: Pupil Labs Eye Tracking User Guide, Joan D. Gannon, Augustine Ubah, Chris Dancy Sep 2019

Technical Report 2019-01: Pupil Labs Eye Tracking User Guide, Joan D. Gannon, Augustine Ubah, Chris Dancy

Other Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.


Bridging Act-R And Project Malmo, Developing Models Of Behavior In Complex Environments, David M. Schwartz Jan 2019

Bridging Act-R And Project Malmo, Developing Models Of Behavior In Complex Environments, David M. Schwartz

Honors Theses

Cognitive architectures such as ACT-R provide a system for simulating the mind and human behavior. On their own they model decision making of an isolated agent. However, applying a cognitive architecture to a complex environment yields more interesting results about how people make decisions in more realistic scenarios. Furthermore, cognitive architectures enable researchers to study human behavior in dangerous tasks which cannot be tested because they would harm participants. Nonetheless, these architectures aren’t commonly applied to such environments as they don’t come with one. It is left to the researcher to develop a task environment for their model. The difficulty …


Covert Singing In Anticipatory Auditory Imagery, Tim A. Pruitt, Andrea R. Halpern, P. Q. Pfordresher Jan 2019

Covert Singing In Anticipatory Auditory Imagery, Tim A. Pruitt, Andrea R. Halpern, P. Q. Pfordresher

Faculty Journal Articles

To date, several fMRI studies reveal activation in motor planning areas during musical auditory imagery. We addressed whether such activations may give rise to peripheral motor activity, termed subvocalization or covert singing, using surface electromyography. sensors placed on extrinsic laryngeal muscles, facial muscles, and a control site on the bicep measured muscle activity during auditory imagery that preceded singing, as well as during the completion of a visual imagery task. Greater activation was found in laryngeal and lip muscles for auditory than for visual imagery tasks, whereas no differences across tasks were found for other sensors. Furthermore, less accurate singers …


Components Of Auditory Imagery In Healthy Aging, Arley K. Schenker Jan 2018

Components Of Auditory Imagery In Healthy Aging, Arley K. Schenker

Master’s Theses

Mental imagery, a complex cognitive task that can be conceptualized into separable components, has been seldom studied in older adults. Auditory imagery is a particularly good modality to study throughout the lifespan, given that sounds can be both highly familiar and unfamiliar and that they inherently take place over a period of time. We tested for age differences in each of the four components of auditory imagery: generation, maintenance, inspection, and transformation. Furthermore, we investigated the degree to which certain cognitive measures that vary among individuals, such as musical background, self-reported auditory imagery, and working memory, predict performance differences. Across …


Score One For Jazz: Working Memory In Jazz And Classical Musicians, Bryan E. Nichols, Clemens Wöllner, Andrea R. Halpern Jan 2018

Score One For Jazz: Working Memory In Jazz And Classical Musicians, Bryan E. Nichols, Clemens Wöllner, Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

Jazz musicians rely on different skills than do classical musicians for successful performances. We investigated the working memory span of classical and jazz student musicians on musical and nonmusical working memory tasks. College-aged musicians completed the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale, followed by verbal working memory tests and musical working memory tests that included visual and auditory presentation modes and written or played recall. Participants were asked to recall the last word (or pitch) from each task after a distraction task, by writing, speaking, or playing the pitch on the piano. Jazz musicians recalled more pitches that were presented in auditory …


Working Memory And Auditory Imagery Predict Sensorimotor Synchronisation With Expressively Timed Music, Ian D. Colley, Peter E. Keller, Andrea R. Halpern Jan 2018

Working Memory And Auditory Imagery Predict Sensorimotor Synchronisation With Expressively Timed Music, Ian D. Colley, Peter E. Keller, Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

Sensorimotor synchronisation (SMS) is prevalent and readily studied in musical settings, as most people are able to perceive and synchronise with a beat (e.g., by finger tapping). We took an individual differences approach to understanding SMS to real music characterised by expressive timing (i.e., fluctuating beat regularity). Given the dynamic nature of SMS, we hypothesised that individual differences in working memory and auditory imagery—both fluid cognitive processes—would predict SMS at two levels: (1) mean absolute asynchrony (a measure of synchronisation error) and (2) anticipatory timing (i.e., predicting, rather than reacting to beat intervals). In Experiment 1, participants completed two working …


Attraction To Sad Music: The Role Of Imagery, Absorption, And Rumination, Emery Schubert, Andrea R. Halpern, Gunter Kreutz, Sandra Garrido Jan 2018

Attraction To Sad Music: The Role Of Imagery, Absorption, And Rumination, Emery Schubert, Andrea R. Halpern, Gunter Kreutz, Sandra Garrido

Faculty Journal Articles

Previous studies have identified links between attraction to negative emotion in music with the traits of absorption and rumination. However, no studies have examined the possible interdependencies and influences of these traits. We sought to determine whether a cognitive processing path that leads to attraction to sad music could be identified. We argued that auditory imagery might be an interesting competency to add to the investigation because of the links between imagery and absorption. Participants completed validated surveys measuring the three target cognitive measures, as well as a Like Sad Music Scale. Mediation analysis revealed that absorption mediated imagery in …


Who's That Knocking At My Door? Neural Bases Of Sound Source Identification, Guillaume Lemaitre, John A. Pyles, Andrea R. Halpern, Nicole Navolio, Matthew Lehet, Laurie M. Heller Jan 2018

Who's That Knocking At My Door? Neural Bases Of Sound Source Identification, Guillaume Lemaitre, John A. Pyles, Andrea R. Halpern, Nicole Navolio, Matthew Lehet, Laurie M. Heller

Faculty Journal Articles

When hearing knocking on a door, a listener typically identifies both the action (forceful and repeated impacts) and the object (a thick wooden board) causing the sound. The current work studied the neural bases of sound source identification by switching listeners' attention toward these different aspects of a set of simple sounds during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning: participants either discriminated the action or the material that caused the sounds, or they simply discriminated meaningless scrambled versions of them. Overall, discriminating action and material elicited neural activity in a left-lateralized frontoparietal network found in other studies of sound identification, wherein …


Musical Expertise Has Minimal Impact On Dual Task Performance, Gianna Cocchini, Maria Serena Filardi, Marcela Crhonkova, Andrea R. Halpern Jan 2017

Musical Expertise Has Minimal Impact On Dual Task Performance, Gianna Cocchini, Maria Serena Filardi, Marcela Crhonkova, Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

Studies investigating effect of practice on dual task performance have yielded conflicting findings, thus supporting different theoretical accounts about the organisation of attentional resources when tasks are performed simultaneously. Because practice has been proven to reduce the demand of attention for the trained task, the impact of long-lasting training on one task is an ideal way to better understand the mechanisms underlying dual task decline in performance. Our study compared performance during dual task execution in expert musicians compared to controls with little if any musical experience. Participants performed a music recognition task and a visuo-spatial task separately (single task) …


Audience Reactions To Repeating A Piece On A Concert Programme, Andrea R. Halpern, Chloe H.K. Chan, Daniel Müllensiefen, John Sloboda Jan 2017

Audience Reactions To Repeating A Piece On A Concert Programme, Andrea R. Halpern, Chloe H.K. Chan, Daniel Müllensiefen, John Sloboda

Faculty Journal Articles

Repetition of a piece on a concert programme is a well-established, but uncommon performance practice. Musicians have presumed that repetition benefits audience enjoyment and understanding but no research has examined this. In two naturalistic and one lab study, we examined audience reaction to repeated live performances of contemporary pieces played by the same ensemble. In all studies, we asked listeners to rate their enjoyment and willingness to hear the piece again (Affective), and perceived understanding and predicted memory of the piece (Cognitive). In Study 3, we assessed immediate recognition memory of each excerpt. In all studies, Cognitive variables increased significantly. …


Are Musical Autobiographical Memories Special? It Ain’T Necessarily So, Andrea Halpern Jan 2017

Are Musical Autobiographical Memories Special? It Ain’T Necessarily So, Andrea Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

We compared young adults' autobiographical (AB) memories involving Music to memories concerning other specific categories and to Everyday AB memories with no specific cue. In all cases, participants reported both their most vivid memory and another AB memory from approximately the same time. We analyzed responses via quantitative ratings scales on aspects such as vividness and importance, as well as via qualitative thematic coding. In the initial phase, comparison of Music-related to Everyday memories suggested all Musical memories had high emotional and vividness characteristics whereas Everyday memories elicited emotion and other heightened responses only in the ‘‘vivid’’ instruction condition. However, …


Pitch Imitation Ability In Mental Transformations Of Melodies, Emma B. Greenspon, Peter Q. Pfordresher, Andrea R. Halpern Jan 2017

Pitch Imitation Ability In Mental Transformations Of Melodies, Emma B. Greenspon, Peter Q. Pfordresher, Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

Previous research suggests that individuals with a vocal pitch imitation deficit (VPID, a.k.a. "poor-pitch singers") experience less vivid auditory images than accurate imitators (pfordresher & halpern, 2013), based on self-report. in the present research we sought to test this proposal directly by having accurate and VPID imitators produce or recognize short melodies based on their original form (untransformed), or after mentally transforming the auditory image of the melody. For the production task, group differences were largest during the untransformed imitation task. importantly, producing mental transformations of the auditory image degraded performance for all participants, but were relatively more disruptive to …


That Note Sounds Wrong! Age-Related Effects In Processing Of Musical Expectation, Andrea R. Halpern, Ioanna Zioga, Martin Shankleman, Job Lindsen, Marcus T. Pearce, Joydeep Bhattacharya Jan 2017

That Note Sounds Wrong! Age-Related Effects In Processing Of Musical Expectation, Andrea R. Halpern, Ioanna Zioga, Martin Shankleman, Job Lindsen, Marcus T. Pearce, Joydeep Bhattacharya

Faculty Journal Articles

Part of musical understanding and enjoyment stems from the ability to accurately predict what note (or one of a small set of notes) is likely to follow after hearing the first part of a melody. Selective violation of expectations can add to aesthetic response but radical or frequent violations are likely to be disliked or not comprehended. In this study we investigated whether a lifetime of exposure to music among untrained older adults would enhance their reaction to unexpected endings of unfamiliar melodies. Older and younger adults listened to melodies that had expected or unexpected ending notes, according to Western …


Perceived And Induced Emotion Responses To Popular Music: Categorical And Dimensional Models, Yading Song, Simon Dixon, Marcus T. Pearce, Andrea R. Halpern Jan 2016

Perceived And Induced Emotion Responses To Popular Music: Categorical And Dimensional Models, Yading Song, Simon Dixon, Marcus T. Pearce, Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

Music both conveys and evokes emotions, and although both phenomena are widely studied, the difference between them is often neglected. The purpose of this study is to examine the difference between perceived and induced emotion for western popular music using both categorical and dimensional models of emotion, and to examine the influence of individual listener differences on their emotion judgment. A total of 80 musical excerpts were randomly selected from an established dataset of 2,904 popular songs tagged with one of the four words "happy," "sad," "angry," or "relaxed" on the last.fm web site. Participants listened to the excerpts and …


Attentional Flexibility And Memory Capacity In Conductors And Pianists, Andrea R. Halpern, Clemens Wöllner Jan 2016

Attentional Flexibility And Memory Capacity In Conductors And Pianists, Andrea R. Halpern, Clemens Wöllner

Faculty Journal Articles

Individuals with high working memory (WM) capacity also tend to have better selective and divided attention. Although both capacities are essential for skilled performance in many areas, evidence for potential training and expertise effects is scarce. We investigated the attentional flexibility of musical conductors by comparing them to equivalently trained pianists. Conductors must focus their attention both on individual instruments and on larger sections of different instruments. We studied students and professionals in both domains to assess the contributions of age and training to these skills. Participants completed WM span tests for auditory and visual (notated) pitches and timing durations, …


A Brain System For Auditory Working Memory, Sukhbinder Kumar, Sabine Joseph, Phillip E. Gander, Nicolas Barascud, Andrea R. Halpern, Timothy D. Griffiths Jan 2016

A Brain System For Auditory Working Memory, Sukhbinder Kumar, Sabine Joseph, Phillip E. Gander, Nicolas Barascud, Andrea R. Halpern, Timothy D. Griffiths

Faculty Journal Articles

The brain basis for auditory working memory, the process of actively maintaining sounds in memory over short periods of time, is controversial. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in human participants, we demonstrate that the maintenance of single tones in memory is associated with activation in auditory cortex. In addition, sustained activation was observed in hippocampus and inferior frontal gyrus. Multivoxel pattern analysis showed that patterns of activity in auditory cortex and left inferior frontal gyrus distinguished the tone that was maintained in memory. Functional connectivity during maintenance was demonstrated between auditory cortex and both the hippocampus and inferior frontal cortex. …


Music, Andrea Halpern Jan 2015

Music, Andrea Halpern

Faculty Contributions to Books

Neuroimaging has contributed greatly to our understanding of the sensory, motor, and cognitive systems involved in musical processing. Cortical loops connecting auditory with parietal, premotor, and prefrontal cortices are important for encoding pitch and temporal relationships from which music is built and for generating musical expectancies. These circuits are also important for holding information in working memory and for interfacing perceptual and motor representations. Musical imagery recruits auditory areas together with frontal and supplementary motor regions. Musical emotion emerges from the interaction of these systems with the reward circuit. All of these systems are modifiable functionally and structurally following training.


Absolute Pitch In Naturalistic Singing: A Commentary On Olthof Et Al., Andrea R. Halpern Jan 2015

Absolute Pitch In Naturalistic Singing: A Commentary On Olthof Et Al., Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

The parent article looks at pitch stability in an archive of folksongs recorded over several decades. Some evidence for pitch stability was found. Here, I consider some additional aspects of the archive that could be examined, offer some extensions to relevant laboratory studies, and consider some inherent strengths and limitations of the naturalistic, archival approach.


Right Parietal Cortex Mediates Recognition Memory For Melodies, Nora K. Schaal, Amir-Homayoun Javadi, Andrea Halpern, Bettina Pollok, Michael J. Banissy Jan 2015

Right Parietal Cortex Mediates Recognition Memory For Melodies, Nora K. Schaal, Amir-Homayoun Javadi, Andrea Halpern, Bettina Pollok, Michael J. Banissy

Faculty Journal Articles

Functional brain imaging studies have highlighted the significance of right-lateralized temporal, frontal and parietal brain areas for memory for melodies. The present study investigated the involvement of bilateral posterior parietal cortices (PPCs) for the recognition memory of melodies using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Participants performed a recognition task before and after tDCS. The task included an encoding phase (12 melodies), a retention period, as well as a recognition phase (24 melodies). Experiment 1 revealed that anodal tDCS over the right PPC led to a deterioration of overall memory performance compared with sham. Experiment 2 confirmed the results of Experiment …


Differences In Auditory Imagery Self-Report Predict Neural And Behavioral Outcomes, Andrea R. Halpern Jan 2015

Differences In Auditory Imagery Self-Report Predict Neural And Behavioral Outcomes, Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

Mental imagery abilities vary among individuals, as shown both by objective measures and by self-report. Few imagery studies consider auditory imagery, however. The Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale is a short self-report measure encompassing both Vividness and Control subscales for musical, verbal, and environmental sounds. It has high internal reliability, no relation to social desirability, and only a modest relation to musical training. High scores on Vividness predict fewer source memory errors in distinguishing heard from imagined tunes on a recognition test, and better performance on pitch imitation tasks. Furthermore, higher scores are related to hemodynamic response and gray matter volume …


Witnessing Reconciliation Reduces Arousal Of Bystanders In A Baboon Group (Papio Hamadryas Hamadryas), Peter G. Judge, Katherine A. Bachmann May 2013

Witnessing Reconciliation Reduces Arousal Of Bystanders In A Baboon Group (Papio Hamadryas Hamadryas), Peter G. Judge, Katherine A. Bachmann

Faculty Journal Articles

Reconciliation is the occurrence of friendly behaviour between opponents shortly after an aggressive conflict. In primate groups, reconciliation reduces aggression and post-conflict arousal. Aggression within a group can also increase arousal of bystanders (e.g. increase bystanders’ rates of self-directed behaviour). Since reconciliation reduces aggression between opponents, we tested whether it also reduces self-directed behaviour in bystanders. Following aggression in a captive group of hamadryas baboons, one observer conducted a focal sample on one of the combatants to document reconciliation and a second observer simultaneously conducted a focal sample on a randomly selected bystander. Matched control observations were then collected on …


Capuchin Monkeys Exercise Self-Control By Choosing Token Exchange Over An Immediate Reward, Peter G. Judge, Jennifer L. Essler Jan 2013

Capuchin Monkeys Exercise Self-Control By Choosing Token Exchange Over An Immediate Reward, Peter G. Judge, Jennifer L. Essler

Faculty Journal Articles

Self-control is a prerequisite for complex cognitive processes such as cooperation and planning. As such, comparative studies of self-control may help elucidate the evolutionary origin of these capacities. A variety of methods have been developed to test for self-control in non-human primates that include some variation of foregoing an immediate reward in order to gain a more favorable reward. We used a token exchange paradigm to test for self-control in capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella). Animals were trained that particular tokens could be exchanged for food items worth different values. To test for self-control, a monkey was provided with …


The Interface Between Morphology And Action Planning: A Comparison Of Two Species Of New World Monkeys, Stacey L. Zander, Dan J. Weiss, Peter G. Judge Jan 2013

The Interface Between Morphology And Action Planning: A Comparison Of Two Species Of New World Monkeys, Stacey L. Zander, Dan J. Weiss, Peter G. Judge

Faculty Journal Articles

Recent research with several species of nonhuman primates suggests sophisticated motor-planning abilities observed in human adults may be ubiquitous among primates. However, there is considerable variability in the extent to which these abilities are expressed across primate species. In the present experiment, we explore whether the variability in the expression of anticipatory motor-planning abilities may be attributed to cognitive differences (such as tool use abilities) or whether they may be due to the consequences of morphological differences (such as being able to deploy a precision grasp). We compared two species of New World monkeys that differ in their tool use …


Introduction To The Neurosciences And Music Iv: Learning And Memory, Andrea Halpern Jan 2012

Introduction To The Neurosciences And Music Iv: Learning And Memory, Andrea Halpern

Faculty Conference Papers and Presentations

The conference entitled "The Neurosciences and Music-IV: Learning and Memory" was held at the University of Edinburgh from June 9-12, 2011, jointly hosted by the Mariani Foundation and the Institute for Music in Human and Social Development, and involving nearly 500 international delegates. Two opening workshops, three large and vibrant poster sessions, and nine invited symposia introduced a diverse range of recent research findings and discussed current research directions. Here, the proceedings are introduced by the workshop and symposia leaders on topics including working with children, rhythm perception, language processing, cultural learning, memory, musical imagery, neural plasticity, stroke rehabilitation, autism, …


Semantic Priming Of Familiar Songs, Sarah K. Johnson, Andrea R. Halpern Jan 2012

Semantic Priming Of Familiar Songs, Sarah K. Johnson, Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

We explored the functional organization of semantic memory for music by comparing priming across familiar songs both within modalities (Experiment 1, tune to tune; Experiment 3, category label to lyrics) and across modalities (Experiment 2, category label to tune; Experiment 4, tune to lyrics). Participants judged whether or not the target tune or lyrics were real (akin to lexical decision tasks). We found significant priming, analogous to linguistic associative-priming effects, in reaction times for related primes as compared to unrelated primes, but primarily for within-modality comparisons. Reaction times to tunes (e.g., "Silent Night") were faster following related tunes ("Deck the …


Dynamic Aspects Of Musical Imagery, Andrea Halpern Jan 2012

Dynamic Aspects Of Musical Imagery, Andrea Halpern

Faculty Conference Papers and Presentations

Auditory imagery can represent many aspects of music, such as the starting pitches of a tune or the instrument that typically plays it. In this paper, I concentrate on more dynamic, or time-sensitive aspects of musical imagery, as demonstrated in two recently published studies. The first was a behavioral study that examined the ability to make emotional judgments about both heard and imagined music in real time. The second was a neuroimaging study on the neural correlates of anticipating an upcoming tune, after hearing a cue tune. That study found activation of several sequence-learning brain areas, some of which varied …


Introduction To Special Issue: Dementia And Music, Andrea R. Halpern, Isabelle Peretz, Lola L. Cuddy Jan 2012

Introduction To Special Issue: Dementia And Music, Andrea R. Halpern, Isabelle Peretz, Lola L. Cuddy

Faculty Journal Articles

This special issue follows two previous special issues on music and neurological disorders (April 2008, Volume 23/Issue 4 and April 2010, Volume 25/Issue 4). Like its predecessors, the issue presents studies employing a patient-based approach to music perception, cognition, and emotion. Whereas the earlier issues dealt with acquired and congenital disorders and impairments, the present issue focuses on dementia, primarily on its most common form, Alzheimer's disease (AD).