Non-musicians also have a piano in the head: evidence for spatial–musical associations from line bisection tracking

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• 作者：Matthias Hartmann
• 关键词：SMARC (spatial–musical association of response code) ; Line bisection ; Mouse tracking ; SNARC (spatial–numerical association of response code)
• 刊名：Cognitive Processing
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：February 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：18
• 期：1
• 页码：75-80
• 全文大小：
• 刊物主题：Neurosciences; Behavioral Sciences; Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics);
• 出版者：Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• ISSN：1612-4790
• 卷排序：18

文摘

The spatial representation of ordinal sequences (numbers, time, tones) seems to be a fundamental cognitive property. While an automatic association between horizontal space and pitch height (left-low pitch, right-high pitch) is constantly reported in musicians, the evidence for such an association in non-musicians is mixed. In this study, 20 non-musicians performed a line bisection task while listening to irrelevant high- and low-pitched tones and white noise (control condition). While pitch height had no influence on the final bisection point, participants’ movement trajectories showed systematic biases: When approaching the line and touching the line for the first time (initial bisection point), the mouse cursor was directed more rightward for high-pitched tones compared to low-pitched tones and noise. These results show that non-musicians also have a subtle but nevertheless automatic association between pitch height and the horizontal space. This suggests that spatial–musical associations do not necessarily depend on constant sensorimotor experiences (as it is the case for musicians) but rather reflect the seemingly inescapable tendency to represent ordinal information on a horizontal line.