Abstract
The way the visual system processes different scales of spatial information has been widely studied, highlighting the dominant role of global over local processing. Recent studies addressing how the auditory system deals with local–global temporal information suggest a comparable processing scheme, but little is known about how this organization is modulated by long-term musical training, in particular regarding musical sequences. Here, we investigate how non-musicians and expert musicians detect local and global pitch changes in short hierarchical tone sequences structured across temporally-segregated triplets made of musical intervals (local scale) forming a melodic contour (global scale) varying either in one direction (monotonic) or both (non-monotonic). Our data reveal a clearly distinct organization between both groups. Non-musicians show global advantage (enhanced performance to detect global over local modifications) and global-to-local interference effects (interference of global over local processing) only for monotonic sequences, while musicians exhibit the reversed pattern for non-monotonic sequences. These results suggest that the local–global processing scheme depends on the complexity of the melodic contour, and that long-term musical training induces a prominent perceptual reorganization that reshapes its initial global dominance to favour local information processing. This latter result supports the theory of “analytic” processing acquisition in musicians.
Highlights
The way the visual system processes different scales of spatial information has been widely studied, highlighting the dominant role of global over local processing
The way the visual system processes global vs. local scales of spatial information has been addressed for a long time[1], first under the metaphorical terms: Which dominates visual perception, the forest or the trees? Controlled laboratory experiments were conducted to characterize the local–global processing organization of the visual system, employing hierarchical visual patterns arranged spatially and presented simultaneously, such as large characters (“global” scale) made out of smaller characters (“local” scale), either congruent or incongruent; for a review, s ee[2]
While the global precedence effect seems to reflect an important property of how visual processing is initially structured, this organization remains plastic, and global processing can in some conditions be affected by incongruent local information
Summary
The way the visual system processes different scales of spatial information has been widely studied, highlighting the dominant role of global over local processing. Based on the observation that local and global levels of the musical stimuli used in Peretz’ study[9] could not be manipulated independently (because a contour modification inherently involved an interval change; s ee10), Justus and L ist[6] designed a new set of stimuli allowing pitch manipulations either at a local level (on one note in a short temporal window) and/or a global level (on a group of notes in a longer temporal window) in an inde‐ pendent manner These stimuli consist of simple hierarchically structured 9-note sequences, allowing a more direct comparison of local–global organization results obtained from the visual stimuli of Navon’s s tudy[1]. Most studies that followed employed these controlled local–global hierarchical stimuli, in which listeners’ task was to determine whether the local (or global) information was going up/down in p itch[10,11,12]
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