Abstract
Although the relation between tonality and musical memory has been fairly well-studied, less is known regarding the contribution of tonal-schematic expectancies to this relation. Three experiments investigated the influence of tonal expectancies on memory for single tones in a tonal melodic context. In the first experiment, listener responses indicated superior recognition of both expected and unexpected targets in a major tonal context than for moderately expected targets. Importantly, and in support of previous work on false memories, listener responses also revealed a higher false alarm rate for expected than unexpected targets. These results indicate roles for tonal schematic congruency as well as distinctiveness in memory for melodic tones. The second experiment utilized minor melodies, which weakened tonal expectancies since the minor tonality can be represented in three forms simultaneously. Finally, tonal expectancies were abolished entirely in the third experiment through the use of atonal melodies. Accordingly, the expectancy-based results observed in the first experiment were disrupted in the second experiment, and disappeared in the third experiment. These results are discussed in light of schema theory, musical expectancy, and classic memory work on the availability and distinctiveness heuristics.
Highlights
The study of expectancy, defined as “the anticipation of upcoming information based on past and current information” (Schmuckler, 1997) has a long history in cognitive psychology
Participant responses (“target present” vs. “target absent”) were used to calculate the hit rate and false alarm rate for each target condition. These hit and false alarms rates were in turn used to calculate the bias-free sensitivity index d, and the bias index c according to signal detection theory (MacMillan and Creelman, 2005). d reveals the separation between the means of the signal (“target present”) and noise (“target absent”) distributions, and indicates how well participants were able to discriminate between trials in which the target had occurred in the melody and trials in which it had not
Experiment 1 demonstrated that when a tonal schema was strongly evoked by a major melodic context, memory was enhanced for both schematically congruent and incongruent tones, with congruent tones falsely remembered when they were not present in a melody
Summary
The study of expectancy, defined as “the anticipation of upcoming information based on past and current information” (Schmuckler, 1997) has a long history in cognitive psychology. Neisser defined anticipatory schemata as mental structures that prepared individuals for action as well as readying them for certain kinds of sensory input. From this perspective, schemata drive expectancies, and in some ways, “schema” and “expectancy” can be considered two approaches to describing the same cognitive process, with that process using the schematic structure to produce an expectation for an event. Expectancy has been studied in numerous contexts, including perceptual processing (e.g., Brown and Hildum, 1956; Dykes and Pascal, 1981), attention (e.g., Posner, 1980; Downing, 1988), linguistic processing (e.g., Fodor et al, 1974; Mills, 1980; McClelland and O’Regan, 1981; Anderson and Pearson, 1984), and the cognition of narratives (e.g., Bartlett, 1932; Mandler and Johnson, 1977; Bransford, 1979)
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