Abstract
Individuals possessing absolute pitch (AP) are able to identify a given musical tone or to reproduce it without reference to another tone. The present study sought to learn whether this exceptional auditory ability impacts visual perception under stimulus conditions that provoke visual competition in the form of binocular rivalry. Nineteen adult participants with 3–19 years of musical training were divided into two groups according to their performance on a task involving identification of the specific note associated with hearing a given musical pitch. During test trials lasting just over half a minute, participants dichoptically viewed a scrolling musical score presented to one eye and a drifting sinusoidal grating presented to the other eye; throughout the trial they pressed buttons to track the alternations in visual awareness produced by these dissimilar monocular stimuli. On “pitch-congruent” trials, participants heard an auditory melody that was congruent in pitch with the visual score, on “pitch-incongruent” trials they heard a transposed auditory melody that was congruent with the score in melody but not in pitch, and on “melody-incongruent” trials they heard an auditory melody completely different from the visual score. For both groups, the visual musical scores predominated over the gratings when the auditory melody was congruent compared to when it was incongruent. Moreover, the AP participants experienced greater predominance of the visual score when it was accompanied by the pitch-congruent melody compared to the same melody transposed in pitch; for non-AP musicians, pitch-congruent and pitch-incongruent trials yielded equivalent predominance. Analysis of individual durations of dominance revealed differential effects on dominance and suppression durations for AP and non-AP participants. These results reveal that AP is accompanied by a robust form of bisensory interaction between tonal frequencies and musical notation that boosts the salience of a visual score.
Highlights
Perception–the sensory based experience of objects and events in our environment—seems to transpire automatically and effortlessly, but that impression is illusory [1]
Using a t-test to assess differences between the percentages of correct answers in the two groups defined, we found, not surprisingly, that scores were significantly higher for the absolute pitch (AP) group compared to the non-AP group (% correct answers t (14.161) = 9.017, p < .001, Cohen’s effect size index d = 4.792)
We pointed out earlier the possibility that some participants without AP may have produced inflated scores by using a response strategy that relied on relative pitch
Summary
Perception–the sensory based experience of objects and events in our environment—seems to transpire automatically and effortlessly, but that impression is illusory [1]. Rivalry occurs where two dissimilar monocular images are presented to corresponding retinal locations of the two eyes: rather than blending into a stable binocular impression, the two images compete for visual dominance, meaning that people experience spontaneous, unpredictable alternations in perceptual awareness of the two dissimilar images [4,5,6] This competition between two conflicting perceptual outcomes is influenced by visual factors such as contrast [7, 8], motion [9], and complexity [10], but non-visual factors too are very important determinants of the dynamics of rivalry [11]. That robust audio-visual interaction revealed that the resolution of visual competition can be influenced by high-level, symbolic representations, namely melodic structure and musical notation
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