Memory for surface features of unfamiliar melodies: independent effects of changes in pitch and tempo.

A melody's identity is determined by relations between consecutive tones in terms of pitch and duration, whereas surface features (i.e., pitch level or key, tempo, and timbre) are irrelevant.

Listeners remember music they like.

Emotions have important and powerful effects on cognitive processes. Although it is well established that memory influences liking, we sought to document whether liking influences memory. A series of 6 experiments examined whether liking is related to recognition memory for novel music excerpts.

Music cognition: a developmental perspective.

Although music is universal, there is a great deal of cultural variability in music structures. Nevertheless, some aspects of music processing generalize across cultures, whereas others rely heavily on the listening environment. Here, we discuss the development of musical knowledge, focusing on four themes: (a) capabilities that are present early in development; (b) culture-general and culture-specific aspects of pitch and rhythm processing; (c) age-related changes in pitch perception; and (d) developmental changes in how listeners perceive emotion in music.

Liking and identifying emotionally expressive music: age and gender differences.

Adults and children 5, 8, and 11 years of age listened to short excerpts of unfamiliar music that sounded happy, scary, peaceful, or sad. Listeners initially rated how much they liked each excerpt. They subsequently made a forced-choice judgment about the emotion that each excerpt conveyed.

Shifting perceptions: developmental changes in judgments of melodic similarity.

Musical melodies are recognized on the basis of pitch and temporal relations between consecutive tones. Although some previous evidence (e.g.

Developmental changes in the perception of pitch contour: distinguishing up from down.

Musically untrained participants in five age groups (5-, 6-, 8-, and 11-year-olds, and adults) heard sequences of three 1 s piano tones in which the first and third tones were identical (A5, or 880 Hz) but the middle tone was displaced upward or downward in pitch. Their task was to identify whether the middle tone was higher or lower than the other two tones. In experiment 1, 5-year-olds successfully identified upward and downward shifts of 4, 2, 1, 0.

Masked repetition priming and proportion effects under cognitive load.

The authors used a cognitive load manipulation (rehearsing a string of digits during the trial) to test the automaticity of (a) masked repetition priming and (b) the masked repetition proportion (RP) effect (i.e., greater priming when the proportion of repetition-prime trials is higher) in the lexical decision task.