0000000000684221
AUTHOR
Charles Delbé
Introducing implicit learning: from the laboratory to the real life
The dissociation between implicit and explicit cognition has a long history in psychology. As early as 1920, Clark Hull (25) investigated the learning of Chinese ideographs and identified the process of concept formation by abstraction of common elements, a process that occurs without explicit knowledge from the subjects of these regularities. Perceptual learning is another example of those processes that take place largely in the absence of awareness of the rules that govern the stimulations of the environment. Helmholtz (24) was one of the first to refer to implicit inference made by the perceptual system and to perceptual learning. Some years later, the distinction between implicit and e…
Categorization of Extremely Brief Auditory Stimuli: Domain-Specific or Domain-General Processes?
The present study investigated the minimum amount of auditory stimulation that allows differentiation of spoken voices, instrumental music, and environmental sounds. Three new findings were reported. 1) All stimuli were categorized above chance level with 50 ms-segments. 2) When a peak-level normalization was applied, music and voices started to be accurately categorized with 20 ms-segments. When the root-mean-square (RMS) energy of the stimuli was equalized, voice stimuli were better recognized than music and environmental sounds. 3) Further psychoacoustical analyses suggest that the categorization of extremely brief auditory stimuli depends on the variability of their spectral envelope in…
How functional coupling between the auditory cortex and the amygdala induces musical emotion: a single case study.
Music is a sound structure of remarkable acoustical and temporal complexity. Although it cannot denote specific meaning, it is one of the most potent and universal stimuli for inducing mood. How the auditory and limbic systems interact, and whether this interaction is lateralized when feeling emotions related to music, remains unclear. We studied the functional correlation between the auditory cortex (AC) and amygdala (AMY) through intracerebral recordings from both hemispheres in a single patient while she listened attentively to musical excerpts, which we compared to passive listening of a sequence of pure tones. While the left primary and secondary auditory cortices (PAC and SAC) showed …
L'apprentissage implicite de la musique occidentale
International audience; L’apprentissage implicite désigne une forme d’apprentissage durant laquelle nous intériorisons tacitement la structure des stimulations qui nous parviennent de l’environnement. La musique constitue une structure écologique de cet environnement qui présente de nombreux intérêts pour l’étude des apprentissages implicites. Réciproquement, les travaux actuels sur l’apprentissage implicite sont importants pour les sciences de la musique car ils conduisent à repenser le statut des compétences cognitives requises pour les activités musicales. Dans ce chapitre, nous montrerons qu'il est très probable que les connaissances implicites acquises par l’auditeur sans formation mus…
Investigation of the relationships between audio features and induced emotions in Contemporary Western music
International audience; This paper focuses on emotion recognition and under-standing in Contemporary Western music. The study seeks to investigate the relationship between perceived emotion and musical features in the fore-mentioned mus-ical genre. A set of 27 Contemporary music excerpts is used as stimuli to gather responses from both musicians and non-musicians which are then mapped on an emo-tional plane in terms of arousal and valence dimensions. Audio signal analysis techniques are applied to the corpus and a base feature set is obtained. The feature set contains characteristics ranging from low-level spectral and tem-poral acoustic features to high-level contextual features. The featu…
Empirical evidence for musical syntax processing? Computer simulations reveal the contribution of auditory short-term memory
During the last decade, it has been argued that (1) music processing involves syntactic representations similar to those observed in language, and (2) that music and language share similar syntactic-like processes and neural resources. This claim is important for understanding the origin of music and language abilities and, furthermore, it has clinical implications. The Western musical system, however, is rooted in psychoacoustic properties of sound, and this is not the case for linguistic syntax. Accordingly, musical syntax processing could be parsimoniously understood as an emergent property of auditory memory rather than a property of abstract processing similar to linguistic processing.…
RECURRENT SELF-ORGANIZATION OF SENSORY SIGNALS IN THE AUDITORY DOMAIN
In this study, a psychoacoustical and connectionist modeling framework is proposed for the investigation of musical cognition. It is suggested that music perception involves the manipulation of 1) sensory representations that have correlations with psychoacoustical features of the stimulus, and 2) abstract representations of the statistical regularities underlying a particular musical syntax. In the implicit learning domain, sensory features have been shown to interact with the processes involved in the extraction of the regularities governing musical events combinations in a stream [e.g., 1]. Furthermore, in a more ecological context, it is well known that traditional Western tonal system …
Catégorisation asymétrique de séquences de hauteurs musicales
Asymmetric Categorization in the Sequential Auditory Domain An unusual visual category learning asymmetry in infants was observed by Quinn, Eimas, and Rosenkrantz (1993). A series of experiments and simulations seemed to show that this asymmetry was due the perceptual inclusion of the cat category within the dog category because of the greater perceptual variability of the distributions of the visual features of dogs compared to cats (Mareschal & French, 1997; Mareschal, French, & Quinn, 2000; French, Mermillod, Quinn, & Mareschal, 2001; French, Mareschal, Mermillod, & Quinn, 2004). In the present paper, we explore whether this asymmetric categorization phenomenon generalizes to the auditor…
Long-term melodic expectation: The unexpected observation of distant priming effects
The report provides a brief account of an experiment whose control conditions produced interestingly counter-intuitive results. The method adapted priming techniques to explore whether imagining well-known melodies would facilitate perceptual discrimination of congruent compared to incongruent melodic continuations in a syllable identification task. This was shown to be the case, but in a subsequent control experiment, imagining an irrelevant lure melody also showed a priming effect. The persistent priming effect apparently related the target sequence to the aurally presented, nonadjacent opening notes, and not to the intervening mental image. A number of statistical analyses of the pitch …
Use of ultrasonic vocalizations to assess olfactory detection in mouse pups treated with 3-methylindole.
International audience; Altricial mammals use olfaction long before the olfactory bulb has reached its anatomically mature state. Indeed, while audition and vision are still not functional, the olfactory system of newborn animals can clearly process distinct odorant molecules. Although several previous studies have emphasized the important role that olfaction plays in early critical functions, it has been difficult to develop a sensitive and reliable test to precisely quantify olfactory ability in pups. One difficulty in determining early sensory capabilities is the rather limited behavioral repertory of neonates. The present study examines the use of ultrasonic vocalizations emitted by iso…