Spatial representation of pitch height: the SMARC effect

Rusconi, Elena; Kwan, B. W.; Giordano, Bruno L.; Umiltà, Carlo; Butterworth, Brian

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.01.004

Cited by 443 publications

(590 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…The results obtained in our study also go further in terms of explaining the origin of the spatial mapping of pitch which underlies a well-documented series of effects (e.g. Evans & Treisman, 2010;Patching & Quinlan, 2002;Rusconi et al, 2006). They challenge the idea of a general, amodal spatial representation of pitch shared across all modalities, along with other spatial representations of magnitudes (e.g.…”

Section: General Discussion and Conclusionsupporting

confidence: 79%

“…In most cases, the spatial mapping of pitch has been assessed in reference to the location of visual targets or the direction of visual movement (see Occelli et al, 2009, for an exception and a review). In stimulusresponse compatibility effects in which participants are shown to be faster at responding to a high pitch sound with the upper key rather than the lower one (Rusconi et al, 2006), vision might also play a role as participants can perceive or imagine the visual organisation of the two response buttons. In the study reported here, we investigated whether the spatial mapping of pitch was intimately tied to vision.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to the spatial theory of magnitude, differences in pitch are represented as 'high' or 'low' in an amodal mental space, like differences in brightness or numerical quantities (Rusconi et al, 2005(Rusconi et al, , 2006; see also Gevers et al, 2003;Kadosh et al, 2008 for discussion). If this is indeed the case, we would expect pitch to be commonly represented in a similar spatial way, independently of the modality used to evidence this representation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Differentiated audio-tactile correspondences in sighted and blind individuals.

Deroy¹,

Fasiello²,

Hayward³

et al. 2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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The aim of the present study is to investigate whether the crossmodal correspondence robustly documented between auditory pitch and visual elevation has analogues in the audio-tactile domain. Across 4 experiments, the compatibility effects between intuitively congruent pairs of stimuli (i.e., outward tactile movement, going from the inside of the finger toward the fingertip and increasing pitch, or inward tactile movement and decreasing pitch) and incongruent pairs stimuli (i.e., the reverse associations) were measured. Two methods were compared to assess the behavioral effects of such a correspondence: One where participants have to respond to either the auditory or tactile stimulus presented simultaneously, while ignoring the other (speeded classification task), and the other where the auditory and tactile stimuli are presented sequentially and associated to different response buttons (implicit association test). No significant compatibility effect was observed under the speeded classification task. The implicit association test revealed a significant compatibility effect. This effect was similar in the conditions where the finger was placed vertically and horizontally. However, this implicit association between pitch and tactile movements was not observed in blind participants. These results have methodological implications for the explanation and testing of crossmodal correspondences, and the origin of the widely discussed association between pitch and vertical elevation.

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Section: General Discussion and Conclusionsupporting

confidence: 79%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Differentiated audio-tactile correspondences in sighted and blind individuals.

Deroy¹,

Fasiello²,

Hayward³

et al. 2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A slightly different prediction can be made, based on the SMARC effect. As said before, when performing a timber identification task of sounds with different pitches, musicians are faster on low-pitched tones when pressing a key to their left and on high-pitched tones when pressing a key to their right (Rusconi et al 2006;Lidji et al, 2007). If this is true, in our experiment both pianists and non-pianist musicians should show association between right-hand responses and high-pitched sounds and left-hand responses and low-pitched sounds.…”

supporting

confidence: 62%

“…In fact, when performing a timber identification task of sounds with different pitches, musicians are faster on low-pitched tones when pressing a left-side key and on high-pitched tones when pressing a right-side key (Rusconi et al 2006;Lidji et al, 2007). This phenomenon has been called the Spatial Musical Association of Response Code (SMARC) effect.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit chord processing and motor representation in pianists

Trimarchi

Luzzatti

2010

Psychological Research

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Article in press on Psychological Research 1 2 AbstractThe aim of this paper is to assess the relevance of pitch dimension in auditory-motor interaction. Several behavioral and brain imaging studies have shown that auditory processing of sounds can activate motor representations, an effect which is however elicited only by action-related sounds, i.e., sounds linked to a specific motor repertoire. Music provides an appropriate framework for further exploration of this issue. Three groups of participants (pianists, non-pianist musicians and nonmusicians) were tested with a shape decision task where left-hand and right-hand responses were required; each visual stimulus was paired with an auditory taskirrelevant stimulus (high-pitched or low-pitched piano-timbre chords). Of the three groups, only pianists had longer reaction times for left-hand/high-pitched chords and right-hand/low-pitched chords associations. These findings are consistent with an auditory-motor effect elicited by pitch dimension, as only pianists show an interaction between motor responses and implicit pitch processing. This interaction is consistent with the canonical mapping of hand gestures and pitch dimension on the piano keyboard. The results are discussed within the ideo-motor theoretical framework offered by the Theory of Event Coding (Hommel et al., 2001. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 849-937).Keywords: music, auditory-motor interaction, pitch 3 Performing music requires close interplay between the auditory and the motor systems (Pfordresher 2006). When a musician performs an action on his instrument, by moving his fingers over a piano keyboard for example, an effect is produced (in this case, piano sounds); his ultimate aim in performing the action is to exploit the action-effect relationship to produce melodies and chords. This study focuses on this relationship in pianists.The nature of the relationship between actions and action effects at a representational level was conceptualized by Hommel and colleagues (2001) in a theoretical framework defined as the Theory of Event Coding (TEC). The core contention of this hypothesis is that "codes of perceived events (e.g. action effect)

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The origins of musicality in the motion of primates

Schruth,

Templeton,

Holman

et al. 2024

American Journal of Biological Anthropology

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Animals communicate acoustically to report location, identity, and emotive state to conspecifics. Acoustic signals can also function as displays to potential mates and as territorial advertisement. Music and song are terms often reserved only for humans and birds, but elements of both forms of acoustic display are also found in non‐human primates. While culture, bonding, and side‐effects all factor into the emergence of musicality, biophysical insights into what might be signaled by specific acoustic features are less well understood.ObjectivesHere we probe the origins of musicality by evaluating the links between musical features (structural complexity, rhythm, interval, and tone) and a variety of potential ecological drivers of its evolution across primate species. Alongside other hypothesized causes (e.g. territoriality, sexual selection), we evaluated the hypothesis that perilous arboreal locomotion might favor musical calling in primates as a signal of capacities underlying spatio‐temporal precision in motor tasks.Materials and MethodsWe used musical features found in spectrographs of vocalizations of 58 primate species and corresponding measures of locomotion, diet, ranging, and mating. Leveraging phylogenetic information helped us impute missing data and control for relatedness of species while selecting among candidate multivariate regression models.ResultsResults indicated that rapid inter‐substrate arboreal locomotion is highly correlated with several metrics of music‐like signaling. Diet, alongside mate‐choice and range size, emerged as factors that also correlated with complex calling patterns.DiscussionThese results support the hypothesis that musical calling may function as a signal, to neighbors or potential mates, of accuracy in landing on relatively narrow targets.

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Spatial representation of pitch height: the SMARC effect

Cited by 443 publications

References 31 publications

Differentiated audio-tactile correspondences in sighted and blind individuals.

Differentiated audio-tactile correspondences in sighted and blind individuals.

Implicit chord processing and motor representation in pianists

The origins of musicality in the motion of primates

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