0000000001325868
AUTHOR
Peter Sedlmeier
Free Word Associations Correspond to Contiguities Between Words in Texts*
A free associative response is the first word a person comes up with after perceiving another word, the so-called associative stimulus. People commonly associate hot to cold, church to priest, and hard to work. According to traditional association theory this behaviour is the result of learning by contiguity: “Objects once experienced together tend to become associated in the imagination, so that when any one of them is thought of, the others are likely to be thought of also, in the same order of sequence or coexistence as before” (James, 1890). This explanation has been rejected by cognitive psychologists who explain the production of associations as the result of symbolic processes which …
What makes us like music?
Why do we like the music we like and why do different people like different kinds of music? Existing models try to explain music preference as an interplay of musical features, the characteristics of the listener, and the listening context. Hereby, they refer to short-term preference decisions for a given piece of music rather than to the question why we listen to music at all and why we select a particular musical style. In this paper, it is hypothesized that the motivation for music listening and the liking for a particular kind of music depend on the functions that this music can fulfill for the listener. Thus, the relative contribution of these functions to the development of music pref…