Several Levels Of Processing Research Articles

A Dynamic Interactive Approach to Music Listening: The Role of Entrainment, Attunement and Resonance

This paper takes a dynamic interactive stance to music listening. It revolves around the focal concept of entrainment as an operational tool for the description of fine-grained dynamics between the music as an entraining stimulus and the listener as an entrained subject. Listeners, in this view, can be “entrained” by the sounds at several levels of processing, dependent on the degree of attunement and alignment of their attention. The concept of entrainment, however, is somewhat ill-defined, with distinct conceptual labels, such as external vs. mutual, symmetrical vs. asymmetrical, metrical vs. non-metrical, within-persons and between-person, and physical vs. cognitive entrainment. The boundaries between entrainment, resonance, and synchronization are also not always very clear. There is, as such, a need for a broadened approach to entrainment, taking as a starting point the concept of oscillators that interact with each other in a continuous and ongoing way, and relying on the theoretical framework of interaction dynamics and the concept of adaptation. Entrainment, in this broadened view, is seen as an adaptive process that accommodates to the music under the influence of both the attentional direction of the listener and the configurations of the sounding stimuli.

Music as Environment: Biological and Ecological Constraints on Coping with the Sounds

This paper deals with musical sense-making in a real-time listening situation. Revolving around the ecological conception of organism-environment interaction, it elaborates on the interactions between the listener as an organism and the music as environment. The listener, in this view, can be described in terms of coping behavior that is shaped by biological and ecological constraints. Relying on the seminal work by von Uexküll and Gibson in the fields of biosemiotics and ecology, with a special emphasis on the concepts of functional tone and affordance, listeners are defined as organisms that actively seek for information by carrying out physical and epistemic interactions on the sonic environment. As such, they construct an inner model of the sonic world as the sum total of subjective meanings that are assigned to those elements that receive semantic weight. By stressing the role of functional significance and interactions, this approach is on a continuum with the biosemiotic claims that music knowledge must be generated as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world. Musical sense-making, in this view, relies on several levels of processing, going from low-level reactivity to higher-level processing by the brain.

Prediction During Natural Language Comprehension.

The notion of prediction is studied in cognitive neuroscience with increasing intensity. We investigated the neural basis of 2 distinct aspects of word prediction, derived from information theory, during story comprehension. We assessed the effect of entropy of next-word probability distributions as well as surprisal A computational model determined entropy and surprisal for each word in 3 literary stories. Twenty-four healthy participants listened to the same 3 stories while their brain activation was measured using fMRI. Reversed speech fragments were presented as a control condition. Brain areas sensitive to entropy were left ventral premotor cortex, left middle frontal gyrus, right inferior frontal gyrus, left inferior parietal lobule, and left supplementary motor area. Areas sensitive to surprisal were left inferior temporal sulcus ("visual word form area"), bilateral superior temporal gyrus, right amygdala, bilateral anterior temporal poles, and right inferior frontal sulcus. We conclude that prediction during language comprehension can occur at several levels of processing, including at the level of word form. Our study exemplifies the power of combining computational linguistics with cognitive neuroscience, and additionally underlines the feasibility of studying continuous spoken language materials with fMRI.

Pushing typists back on the learning curve: Revealing chunking in skilled typewriting.

Theories of skilled performance propose that highly trained skills involve hierarchically structured control processes. The present study examined and demonstrated hierarchical control at several levels of processing in skilled typewriting. In the first two experiments, we scrambled the order of letters in words to prevent skilled typists from chunking letters, and compared typing words and scrambled words. Experiment 1 manipulated stimulus quality to reveal chunking in perception, and Experiment 2 manipulated concurrent memory load to reveal chunking in short-term memory (STM). Both experiments manipulated the number of letters in words and nonwords to reveal chunking in motor planning. In the next two experiments, we degraded typing skill by altering the usual haptic feedback by using a laser-projection keyboard, so that typists had to monitor keystrokes. Neither the number of motor chunks (Experiment 3) nor the number of STM items (Experiment 4) was influenced by the manipulation. The results indicate that the utilization of hierarchical control depends on whether the input allows chunking but not on whether the output is generated automatically. We consider the role of automaticity in hierarchical control of skilled performance.

Music Recognition in Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration and Alzheimer Disease

To compare music recognition in patients with frontotemporal dementia, semantic dementia, Alzheimer disease, and controls and to evaluate the relationship between music recognition and brain volume. Recognition of familiar music depends on several levels of processing. There are few studies about how patients with dementia recognize familiar music. Subjects were administered tasks that assess pitch and melody discrimination, detection of pitch errors in familiar melodies, and naming of familiar melodies. There were no group differences on pitch and melody discrimination tasks. However, patients with semantic dementia had considerable difficulty naming familiar melodies and also scored the lowest when asked to identify pitch errors in the same melodies. Naming familiar melodies, but not other music tasks, was strongly related to measures of semantic memory. Voxel-based morphometry analysis of brain magnetic resonance imaging showed that difficulty in naming songs was associated with the bilateral temporal lobes and inferior frontal gyrus, whereas difficulty in identifying pitch errors in familiar melodies correlated with primarily the right temporal lobe. The results support a view that the anterior temporal lobes play a role in familiar melody recognition, and that musical functions are affected differentially across forms of dementia.

Perceived luminance depends on temporal context.

Brightness--the perception of an object's luminance--arises from complex and poorly understood interactions at several levels of processing. It is well known that the brightness of an object depends on its spatial context, which can include perceptual organization, scene interpretation, three-dimensional interpretation, shadows, and other high-level percepts. Here we present a new class of illusion in which temporal relations with spatially neighbouring objects can modulate a target object's brightness. When compared with a nearby patch of constant luminance, a brief flash appears brighter with increasing onset asynchrony. Simultaneous contrast, retinal effects, masking, apparent motion and attentional effects cannot account for this illusory enhancement of brightness. This temporal context effect indicates that two parallel streams--one adapting and one non-adapting--encode brightness in the visual cortex.

A transition between eye and object rivalry determined by stimulus coherence

Two orthogonal patterns presented to the two eyes, respectively, are perceived as alternating in time, a phenomenon often assumed to reflect competition between neuronal activities corresponding to the two eyes, presumably in the primary visual cortex. Recent evidence supports a competition between neuronal activities corresponding to the two patterns (objects) at some higher cortical processing stage after inputs from the two eyes have converged. Here, using textures made of Gabor signals, we present psychophysical data showing that the level of visual processing at which competition takes place and is resolved, is determined by the degree of stimulus coherence. Moreover, depending on stimulus parameters, competition may occur at several levels of processing at the same time.

Marine remote sensing information system (MARSIS): a conceptual design

Abstract Remote observations of the sea produce large quantities of data, which must pass through several levels of processing, requiring special facilities and expertise, before reaching the end user. As a consequence, most marine remote-sensing data available at this time are not fully used because the average potential user does not have the means or competence to do so. These information-management problems could be eased through the development of a Marine Remote-Sensing Information System (MARSIS), capable of delivering value-added data sets both according to standard statistical and dynamical procedures and according to specific user requests. A regional MARSIS Centre is envisioned as the nodal point of a distributed information system, which includes three basic modules, devoted respectively to processing, management and communication, as well as a dedicated knowledge-based system connecting the modules themselves to original data repositories and final users. The MARSIS concept has been designed ...

From meta-processes to conscious access: Evidence from children's metalinguistic and repair data

This paper explores possible relations obtaining between unconscious meta-processes and those available to conscious access and verbal statement. It is argued that the issue of conscious access must be conceptualized within a developmental perspective, in order to understand its function in human cognition. A theoretical framework is specified, in the form of a recurrent 3-phase model (differentiated from stage models), which stresses the distinction between implicitly defined representations and progressive representational explicitation at several levels of processing, culminating in the possibility of conscious access. The role of conscious access, as well as that of negative and positive feedback, are discussed in the light of a distinction drawn between models of developmental sequence and models of information processing flow in real time. Prominence is given to a success-based model of representational change as opposed to a failure-based model of behavioural change. The data consist of a detailed comparison of children's metalinguistic responses and spontaneous repairs. It is argued that metalinguistic awareness has little or no role to play in language acquisition macrodevelopmentally, a minor role to play in linguistic processing in real time, but that verbally encoded representations have an essential role to play in overall macrodevelopment. The implications of the model are briefly examined with respect to the representational status of the fluent language of some children with low IQ and that of fluent adult speakers of a non-native language. Consideration is given to the fact that some aspects of language, but not others, are available to conscious access. This leads to speculations with respect to the plausibility of considering modularity as a product of some aspects of development, rather than restricting modularity solely to innate givens.

Cognitive stages in visual recognition: Visual agnosia

The clinical spectrum of visual agnosia includes a variety of cognitive deficits and the incidence and relationship of these remain problematic. The syndromes of apperceptive and associative visual agnosia overlap most often but the occasional well documented dissociation is of great interest. Experimental evidence concerning these entities is scant and at times controversial but suggests several levels of processing that may be impaired independently. In this article, I shall address myself to these syndromes and attempt to describe the cognitive stages in visual recognition with respect to their intact and defective state, so as to provide an explanation of how the visual system functions cognitively.

The relationship between repetition and depth of processing

The relationship between depth of information processing and stimulus repetitions was investigated using a simultaneous category judgment task. Several levels of processing were defined involving (1) physically identical items, (2) physically different but same-name items, (3) different items from the same semantic category, and (4) items from different categories. Stimulus pairs were represented by words and pictures, and each pair was presented one, three, or five times. Response times for categorization judgments increased with the level of processing and decreased with repetitions. Repetitions produced greater facilitation for decisions at deeper levels of processing. In a final incidental recall task, more items were remembered from category-same trials than from same-item trials, but level of processing did not interact with number of presentations. Repetitions produced an equivalent increase in final recall probability for items involved in all decision types, indicating that distributed repetitions can lead to the formation of stronger memory traces at several levels of processing.

New evidence for “closure” in perception

A new criterion of perceptual grouping (Gillam, 1972), namely, that contours appear to reverse together under conditions of depth ambiguity, was used to test for the reality of “closure” and explore the parameters determining its degree. It was found that contours which would form a closed space but for a linear gap were responded to as a unit to a degree which decreased monotonically with gap size. Neither “proximal” nor “distal” gap was found to be the sole determinant of closure. Several levels of processing appear to be involved.