03/05/2025
Join us next Tuesday, March 11th! Dr. Laura Getz will be discussing how context influences music perception, attention, and memory through experiments on syncopation perception, music’s impact on product perception, and the role of melody familiarity in memory aids. Everyone is welcome! Complimentary coffee and pastries will be available.
📅 Date: Tuesday, Mar. 11, 2025
🕒 Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
🔗 RSVP Link: https://tinyurl.com/GetzRSVP
This event will be held in-person and on Zoom. All are welcome to attend. For accurate headcounts and to receive email reminders about this event, advanced registration is required (RSVP). Please find the flyer attached.
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Musical Pathways: Context Influences Music Perception, Attention, and Memory
In my work, I aim to demonstrate the importance of interactions between sensory information received in the auditory and visual modalities, as well as how sensory information interacts with higher levels of processing, with cognitive processes such as prior knowledge influencing perceptual processing. For this talk I will focus the influence of context on music perception, attention, and memory, using 3 experimental examples.
As a first example, I will show how prior knowledge of genre conventions is required for syncopation perception, using Latin salsa music as a test case. As a second example, pairing music of different pitches, tempos, and timbres with radio advertisements for various products only impacts product perception when active attention is drawn to the music. As a final example, more melody familiarity and repetition can lead music to be used as an effective memory aid compared to a spoken control condition.
Together, these results show strong top-down influences on our musical experiences and highlight the need for careful attention to stimulus creation and task design.
Biography:
Organizing complex perceptual input in real time is crucial for our ability to interact with the world around us, and information received in the auditory modality in particular is central to many fundamental aspects of human behavior (e.g., spoken language, music, sound localization). Dr. Getz’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding auditory perception, with research encompassing speech, cross-modal, and music perception using a combination of behavioral, cognitive neuroscience, and computational modeling approaches. In her work, she seeks to determine to what extent cognitive processes are encapsulated from one another and how perception is influenced by individual and cross-cultural differences, previous knowledge, expertise, and task demands. You can read more about her research on the LAMP lab website: https://www.lamplab.org/.
