Dissociating sensitivity from bias in the mini profile of music perception skills

Abstract

The Mini Profile of Music Perception Skills (Mini-PROMS) is a widely used objective measure of musical competence that has been validated for online data collection [Law and Zentner, PLoS One 7, e52508 (2012); Zentner and Strauss, Ann. NY. Acad. Sci. 1400, 33–45 (2017)]. This measure involves determining whether a comparison melody is the same or different from a standard on a 5-point scale (“definitely different”, “probably different”, “I don’t know”, “probably same”, or “definitely same”). The traditional PROMS scoring method is to calculate a composite score, which differentially weights correct responses based on participant confidence. In this method, a high score can only be achieved with a confident response bias. The present study employed signal detection theory to calculate the participants’ sensitivity (d′), which is a bias-free measure of sensitivity if the signal and noise distributions (1) are normally distributed and (2) have roughly equal variance. 74 participants were tested on the Mini-PROMS with the purpose of calculating empirical ROC curves to test whether the assumptions of normality and variance are met. The study findings will provide important insight into how using different analysis methods might improve the validity of the Mini-PROMS. [Work supported by NIH grant R01 DC005216.]