Mapping the Dynamic Allocation of Temporal Attention in Musical Patterns

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 2018-11, Vol.44 (11), p.1694-1711
• Main Authors: Hurley, Brian K, Fink, Lauren K, Janata, Petr
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Attention; Attention - physiology; Auditory Perception - physiology; Auditory Stimulation; Computer applications; Density; Female; Human; Humans; Instrumental music; Listeners; Male; Mapping; Mathematical models; Models, Theoretical; Music; Oral Communication; Oscillation; Oscillators; Perceptual sensitivity; Probes; Rhythms; Sensory perception; Speech; Speech perception; Stimulus; Temporal logic; Temporal perception; Thresholds; Time Factors; Time Perception; Verbal communication; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0096-1523; 1939-1277
• DOI: 10.1037/xhp0000563

Many environmental sounds, such as music or speech, are patterned in time. Dynamic attending theory, and supporting empirical evidence, suggests that a stimulus's temporal structure serves to orient attention to specific moments in time. One instantiation of this theory posits that attention synchronizes to the temporal structure of a stimulus in an oscillatory fashion, with optimal perception at salient time points or oscillation peaks. We examined whether a model consisting of damped linear oscillators succeeds at predicting temporal attention behavior in rhythmic multi-instrumental music. We conducted 3 experiments in which we mapped listeners' perceptual sensitivity by estimating detection thresholds for intensity deviants embedded at multiple time points within a stimulus pattern. We compared participants' thresholds for detecting intensity changes at various time points with the modeled salience prediction at each of those time points. Across all experiments, results showed that the resonator model predicted listener thresholds, such that listeners were more sensitive to probes at time points corresponding to greater model-predicted salience. This effect held for both intensity increment and decrement probes and for metrically simple and complex stimuli. Moreover, the resonator model explained the data better than did predictions based on canonical metric hierarchy or auditory scene density. Our results offer new insight into the temporal orienting of attention in complex auditory scenes using a parsimonious computational model for predicting attentional dynamics. Public Significance Statement Sounds in the environment, such as music or speech, typically have a rhythmic temporal structure. Previous research has suggested that listeners do not distribute their attention to all moments in time equally but rather focus their attention on certain points in time. In this study, we used a computational model to predict when listeners were most likely to be attending within rhythmic music patterns. We tested our predictions by asking listeners to detect subtle changes at various time points throughout several patterns. In comparing the listeners' data to our model predictions, we showed that it is possible to compute a fine-grained prediction of how humans orient their attention in time.