The cognitive effects of musical expectations on affective priming.

Abstract

Whether music has the potential to enhance cognition has been a question of great psychological interest and arriving at an answer may benefit from consideration of evolutionary psychology (Huron, 2006; Rickard, Toukhsati, & Field, 2005). From an evolutionary perspective, organisms are motivated to form accurate expectations because foresight is important for survival (Huron, 2006). Therefore, pitch expectations about how musical sequences will sound can be assumed to be biologically reinforced. Salimpoor, Benovoy, Larcher, Dagher, and Zatorre (2011) suggested that tension, resolution, anticipation, and expectation induce emotional arousal (positive reinforcement). Music unfolds over time and this organization allows for anticipation to build. More specifically, Muller, Klein, and Jacobsen (2011) propose that the strong pleasure experienced by music listeners is a result of automatically evaluated pitch expectations. Musical expectations are at the crux of music cognition and these expectations may facilitate the understanding of cognitive processes.Previous research has found that listeners do develop expectations while listening to music (for review, see Tillmann, PoulinCharronnat, & Bigand, 2014). Todorovic, Schoffelen, van Ede, Maris, and de Lange (2015) proposed two distinct classes of processes: temporal expectation, the ability to extract regularities from the environment, and attention, the state of anticipating relevant future (p. 1). These processes interact to guide perception by making specific stimuli more salient (e.g., stimuli are recognized quicker they are predictable). Recently, this interaction has been shown to generalize to the auditory modality, in addition to the visual modality (Todorovic et al., 2015). Moreover, Tillmann and colleagues (2014) suggested that expected musical events are better memorized than unexpected ones. Consequently, I hypothesized that a participant's attention would be directed toward emotionally positive events his or her pitch expectations are satisfied.Composers of music can use pitch expectations to their advantage by prompting emotional responses in listeners such as pleasure, pitch expectations are satisfied, and disappointment, when [pitch expectations] are violated (Pearce & Wiggins, 2012, p. 626). It has been suggested that musical expectations in response to an opening musical sequence can facilitate emotional processing, as evidenced by faster and more accurate task-relevant judgments of subsequent closing musical sequences (Tillmann & Marmel, 2013). The perception and judgment of these sequences are influenced by a listener's pitch expectations. Using a variation of the priming paradigm, the present study investigated whether pitch expectations induced by musical chords would influence the perception of other, in this case verbal, stimuli paired with them.The Affective Priming ParadigmIn one auditory adaptation of Affective Priming Paradigm (APP), musical chords, which either satisfy pitch expectations or not, are presented in conjunction with visual word-targets to participants, who identify their affective valence (i.e., negative or positive; Muller et al., 2011; Sollberger, Reber, & Eckstein, 2003; Steinbeis & Koelsch, 2011). The expected result is that the musical primes will significantly influence reaction time (RT) for congruent word-valence identification (e.g., primes that satisfy pitch expectations paired with positive words). Traditionally, APP used single chords to demonstrate this priming effect (Sollberger et al., 2003). Recently, Muller et al. (2011) applied the paradigm using five-chord progressions instead of single-chord primes, and found a much stronger effect of priming.Affective priming effects refer to associative priming in which emotional content increases the sensitivity to and processing of stimuli that are related in emotional terms (Timmers & Crook, 2014, p. …