The role of timing deviations and target position uncertainty on temporal attending in a serial auditory pitch discrimination task

Abstract

Listeners were presented with sequences of tones that ascended in semitone intervals. On each trial a single target tone in the sequence was displaced in pitch, and listeners were required to indicate whether the target tone was higher or lower than its normal pitch. Task constraints, specifically target serial position uncertainty and the probabilistic relationship between time deviations and target tones, were varied in order to determine the impact of task constraints on temporal attending strategy. When listeners had no advance knowledge of the serial position of the target, and early and late targets provided information regarding target serial position, performance was better for early and late target trials than for on-time target trials (Experiment 1). When listeners had no advance knowledge of the serial position of the target, and early and late temporal deviations provided no information regarding target serial position, performance for late target trials was superior to that for early and on-time target trials (Experiment 2). Finally, when target serial position uncertainty was eliminated, performance was equivalent across all three levels of target timing (early, on time, late). The results indicate that performance profiles based on stimulus timing properties are affected by various task constraints as well as by stimulus properties.

Temporal expectancies and rhythmic cueing in touch: The influence of spatial attention

“…RTs did not show a U-shaped pattern benefitting in synchrony targets. Although this contradicts previous rhythmic cueing studies using RTs (e.g., Martin et al, 2005;Sanabria, Capizzi, Correa, 2011) andaccuracy (Herrmann et al, 2016;Lawrance et al, 2014;Rohenkohl et al, 2012), there are also studies which do not support the DAT and even reporting detrimental effects of performance when presenting stimuli in synchrony with a rhythm (Barnes and Johnston, 2010;Spaak et al, 2014;Hickok et al, 2015;Large & Jones, 1999, Experiment 1). For example, Barnes and Johnston (2010) observed that when the target could appear at several different positions in a trial, there was a U-shaped pattern with worse performance for targets in synchrony compared to out of synchrony with the rhythm (Experiment 1).…”

Forward Entrainment: Evidence, Controversies, Constraints, and Mechanisms

“…They speculated that this effect is based on attentional capture and a purely reflexive adaptive shift of attention in time toward the temporal locus of the target sound. Jones and colleagues have confirmed these general findings in several related or follow-up studies (Jones et al, 2006;Ellis and Jones, 2010;Barnes and Jones, 2000;Barnes and Johnston, 2010).…”

“…Several studies have shown that the entrainment phase dissociates from the entraining stimulus phase. Some studies have shown an antiphasic effect (Hickok et al, 2015;Farahbod et al, 2020;Spaak et al, 2014;Simon and Wallace, 2017) while others have shown an in-phase effect (Jones et al, 2002;Ellias and Jones, 2010;Barnes and Johnston, 2010) or even a subject-dependent entrainment phase (Henry and Obleser, 2012) which may be explained by listening strategy (see section 2.3 in the current paper on how off-frequency listening and different attentional strategies may explain Henry and Obleser's behavioral data). Further evidence in support of an attentional mechanism is that the effect seems critically dependent on signal-level uncertainty, at least in tone-in-noise detection tasks where switching to a block design eliminates forward entrainment and reintroducing uncertainty recovers the effect in the same subjects.…”

Temporal expectancies affect accuracy in standard-comparison judgments of duration, but neither pitch height, nor timbre, nor loudness.

“…Note also that Bauer et al (2015) reported performance between .48 and .68 (with chance level at .33) and yet observed no temporal expectancy profiles. This is not the first report of difficulties replicating temporal expectancy profiles (Barnes & Johnston, 2010;Bauer et al, 2015;, but the current study is unique in its variety of task domains (comparisons of pitches, timbres, loudnesses, and durations), addition of the probability manipulation (Experiment 1), and extent of statistical power. The largest contribution of the current data is that temporal expectancies are limited to temporal tasks in the context of standard/comparison judgments.…”