Matching Items (6)
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- All Subjects: psychology
- All Subjects: Perceptions
- Status: Published
Description
Tempo control is a crucial part of musicianship that can provide an obstacle for novice musicians. The current study examines why novice percussionists increase their playing tempo when they increase their loudness (in music, loudness is referred to as dynamics). This study tested five hypotheses: 1) As actual tempo changes, listeners perceive that the tempo is changing; 2) There is a perceptual bias to perceive increases in acoustic intensity as also increasing in tempo; 3) All individuals, regardless of percussion experience, display the bias described in hypothesis 2; 4) Unskilled or non-percussionists increase or decrease produced tempo as they respectively increase or decrease loudness; and 5) Skilled percussionist produce less change in tempo due to changes in loudness than non-percussionists. In Experiment 1, percussionists and non-percussionists listened to metronome samples that gradually change in intensity and/or tempo. Participants identified the direction and size of their perceived tempo change using a computer mouse. In Experiment 2, both groups of participants produced various tempo and dynamic changes on a drum pad. Our findings support that both percussionists and non-percussionists, to some extent, display a perceptual bias to perceive tempo changes as a function of intensity changes. We also found that non-percussionists altered their tempo as a function of changing dynamic levels, whereas percussionists did not. Overall, our findings support that listeners tend to experience some integrality between perceptual dimensions of perceived tempo and loudness. Dimensional integration also persists when playing percussion instruments though experience with percussion instruments reduces this effect.
ContributorsJohnson, Adam Gregory (Author) / McBeath, Michael (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Yost, William (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Human perceptual dimensions of sound are not necessarily simple representations of the actual physical dimensions that make up sensory input. In particular, research on the perception of interactions between acoustic frequency and intensity has shown that people exhibit a bias to expect the perception of pitch and loudness to change together. Researchers have proposed that this perceptual bias occurs because sound sources tend to follow a natural regularity of a correlation between changes in intensity and frequency of sound. They postulate that the auditory system has adapted to expect this naturally occurring relationship to facilitate auditory scene analysis, the tracking and parsing sources of sound as listeners analyze their auditory environments. However, this correlation has only been tested with human speech and musical sounds. The current study explores if animal sounds also exhibit the same natural correlation between intensity and frequency and tests if people exhibit a perceptual bias to assume this correlation when listening to animal calls. Our principal hypotheses are that animal sounds will tend to exhibit a positive correlation between intensity and frequency and that, when hearing such sounds change in intensity, listeners will perceive them to also change in frequency and vice versa. Our tests with 21 animal calls and 8 control stimuli along with our experiment with participants responding to these stimuli supported these hypotheses. This research provides a further example of coupling of perceptual biases with natural regularities in the auditory domain, and provides a framework for understanding perceptual biases as functional adaptations that help perceivers more accurately anticipate and utilize reliable natural patterns to enhance scene analyses in real world environments.
ContributorsWilkinson, Zachary David (Author) / McBeath, Michael (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Rutowski, Ronald (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
We compared sociability towards humans of domesticated and tame members of several Canidae: Belyaev's fox (Vulpes vulpes), red fox (Vulpes vulpes), gray wolf (Canis lupus), dingo (Canis l. dingo), New Guinea singing dog (Canis l. dingo), and dog (Canis l. familiaris). We defined sociability as motivation or willingness to engage with humans. Our operationalized definition of sociability is the latency to approach (LTA) the human experimenter and the amount of time the canid spent within one meter of the human experimenter (PTC). We added an unfamiliar and familiar experimenter condition to deduce whether or not canids discriminated on who they were more social with: an owner or a stranger. To each experimenter condition we added a passive and active phase to discern whether or not canids were more social when called or not. Across all conditions and phases dogs were significantly more social than all other canid types. We concluded genetic differences due to domestication and environmental differences due to socialization accounted for sociability differences seen in dogs compared to the other canid types.
ContributorsBeckstrom-Sternberg, David Tristan (Author) / Wynne, Clive (Thesis director) / McBeath, Michael (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
In baseball, the difference between a win and loss can come down to a single call, such as when an umpire judges force outs at first base by typically comparing competing auditory and visual inputs of the ball-mitt sound and the foot-on-base sight. Yet, because the speed of sound in air only travels about 1100 feet per second, fans observing from several hundred feet away will receive auditory cues that are delayed a significant portion of a second, and thus conceivably could systematically differ in judgments compared to the nearby umpire. The current research examines two questions. 1. How reliably and with what biases do observers judge the order of visual versus auditory events? 2. Do observers making such order judgments from far away systematically compensate for delays due to the slow speed of sound? It is hypothesized that if any temporal bias occurs it is in the direction consistent with observers not accounting for the sound delay, such that increasing viewing distance will increase the bias to assume the sound occurred later. It was found that nearby observers are relatively accurate at judging if a sound occurred before or after a simple visual event (a flash), but exhibit a systematic bias to favor visual stimuli occurring first (by about 30 msec). In contrast, distant observers did not compensate for the delay of the speed of sound such that they systematically favored the visual cue occurring earlier as a function of viewing distance. When observers judged simple visual stimuli in motion relative to the same sound burst, the distance effect occurred as a function of the visual clarity of the ball arriving. In the baseball setting, using a large screen projection of baserunner, a diminished distance effect occurred due to the additional visual cues. In summary, observers generally do not account for the delay of sound due to distance.
ContributorsKrynen, R. Chandler (Author) / McBeath, Michael (Thesis advisor) / Homa, Donald (Committee member) / Gray, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
This study investigates the effects of familiarity and the size of a novel object on perception of depth. Familiar size is a visual depth cue that provides information about the distance of an object. This project explores if the familiar size illusion is a result of an automatic perceptual process or an intellectual thought process. This data was collected in two phases, a familiarization phase and a testing phase. The experimental participants were familiarized for 30 seconds with a novel object, while the control group was not shown any objects prior to presentation of test objects. The novel test stimuli were constructed in 5 sizes and participants in the familiar group were familiarized with the medium size object. Participants were then asked to indicate the perceived distance of different sized objects by moving a rod with a pointer at the end to match the distance. The smaller comparison objects subtended visual angles that participants had not previously experienced, while larger comparison objects produced a larger visual angle than the participants had seen during the familiarization phase. The testing phase was identical for both familiar and unfamiliar control groups. Apparent distance was influenced by the size of the objects. Larger objects were judged to be closer than the smaller objects. Participants not familiarized showed smaller effects of stimulus size than the familiarized group. The effect of familiarity was not significant for the smaller stimuli but was very significant for the larger stimuli. The results were not consistent with the cognitive theory which argues that familiar size is a result of a conscious thought process. These outcomes are predicted under the model of familiar size being an automatic perceptual process.
ContributorsLawrence, Sahana (Author) / Yonas, Albert (Thesis director) / McBeath, Michael (Committee member) / Fabricius, William (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2023-05
Description
Recent findings support that facial musculature accounts for a form of phonetic sound symbolism. Yu, McBeath, and Glenberg (2019) found that, in both English words and Mandarin pinyin, words with the middle phoneme /i:/ (as in “gleam”) were rated as more positive than their paired words containing the phoneme /ʌ/ (as in “glum”). The present study tested whether a second largely orthogonal dimension of vowel phoneme production (represented by the phonemes /æ/ vs /u/), is related to a second dimension perpendicular to emotional valence, arousal. Arousal was chosen because it is the second dimension of the Russell Circumplex Model of Affect. In phonetic similarity mappings, this second dimension is typically characterized by oral aperture size and larynx position, but it also appears to follow the continuum of consonance/dissonance. Our findings supported the hypothesis that one-syllable words with the center vowel phoneme /æ/ were reliably rated as more rousing, and less calming, than matched words with the center vowel phoneme /u/. These results extend the Yu, et al. findings regarding the potential contribution of facial musculature to sounds associated with the emotional dimension of arousal, and further confirm a model of sound symbolism related to emotional expression. These findings support that phonemes are not neutral basic units but rather illustrate an innate relationship between embodied emotional expression and speech production.
ContributorsGreenstein, Ely Conrad (Author) / McBeath, Michael (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Patten, Kristopher (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05