Name:Chihiro Honda

School/Affiliation:University at Buffalo, SUNY

Co-Authors:Peter Q. Pfordresher

Virtual or In-person:In-person

Abstract:

Auditory processing in human brains can be influenced by bottom-up (i.e., stimulus-driven) and top-down (i.e., contextually-driven) factors. The current study explores how top-down factors based on the kind of perceptual decision the participants is asked to make interacts with bottom-up factors based on pitch stability in influencing vocal pitch imitation. Stimuli consisted of brief tones (350 ms) that varied in the type of pitch patterning that could occur within the tone (rising, falling, rising/falling, or falling/rising) and magnitude of pitch change across the duration of the tone (ranging from 5 to 200 cents). In Experiment 1, participants heard listened to and then vocally imitated tones. Pitch imitation was more accurate for smaller than for larger pitch changes. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants engaged in one of two perceptual tasks: whether there was a change in the pitch within the tone (pitch discrimination task) or whether the tone sounds more representative of music or speech (pitch categorization task). On each trial, participants listened to one of the stimuli and answered one of the perceptual questions. Results showed similar trends for the discriminability of pitch change and the pitch categorization; that is, the smaller pitch changes (i.e., 5 cents and 10 cents) were not discriminable and were categorized as music whereas the larger changes (i.e., 150 cents and 200 cents) were discriminable and were categorized as speech. Future research will integrate perception and production tasks to explore how different top-down processing modes affect bottom-up processing of pitch in imitation tasks.