Microtiming and Mental Effort

Jo Fougner Skaansar; Bruno Laeng; Anne Danielsen

doi:10.1525/mp.2019.37.2.111

Microtiming and Mental Effort

Music Perception An Interdisciplinary Journal ◽

10.1525/mp.2019.37.2.111 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 37 (2) ◽

pp. 111-133 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Jo Fougner Skaansar ◽

Bruno Laeng ◽

Anne Danielsen

Keyword(s):

Auditory Processing ◽

Pupil Size ◽

Mental Effort ◽

Cognitive Effort ◽

Pupil Dilation ◽

Sensorimotor Synchronization ◽

Finger Tapping ◽

Pupil Response ◽

Internal Framework

The present study tested two assumptions concerning the auditory processing of microtiming in musical grooves (i.e., repeating, movement-inducing rhythmic patterns): 1) Microtiming challenges the listener's internal framework of timing regularities, or meter, and demands cognitive effort. 2) Microtiming promotes a “groove” experience—a pleasant sense of wanting to move along with the music. Using professional jazz musicians and nonmusicians as participants, we hypothesized that microtiming asynchronies between bass and drums (varying from −80 to 80 ms) were related to a) an increase in “mental effort” (as indexed by pupillometry), and b) a decrease in the quality of sensorimotor synchronization (as indexed by reduced finger tapping stability). We found bass/drums-microtiming asynchronies to be positively related to pupil dilation and negatively related to tapping stability. In contrast, we found that steady timekeeping (presence of eighth note hi-hat in the grooves) decreased pupil size and increased tapping performance, though there were no conclusive differences in pupil response between musicians and nonmusicians. However, jazz musicians consistently tapped with higher stability than nonmusicians, reflecting an effect of rhythmic expertise. Except for the condition most closely resembling real music, participants preferred the on-the-grid grooves to displacements in microtiming and bass-succeeding-drums-conditions were preferred over the reverse.

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Priming Younger and Older Adults’ Sentence Comprehension: Insights from Dynamic Emotional Facial Expressions and Pupil Size Measures

The Open Psychology Journal ◽

10.2174/1874350101609010129 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 129-148 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Maria Nella Carminati ◽

Pia Knoeferle

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Sentence Processing ◽

Pupil Size ◽

Sentence Comprehension ◽

Cognitive Effort ◽

Pupil Dilation ◽

Emotional Facial Expressions ◽

Visual World ◽

Positivity Effect ◽

Positive Valence

Background: Prior visual-world research has demonstrated that emotional priming of spoken sentence processing is rapidly modulated by age. Older and younger participants saw two photographs of a positive and of a negative event side-by-side and listened to a spoken sentence about one of these events. Older adults’ fixations to the mentioned (positive) event were enhanced when the still photograph of a previously-inspected positive-valence speaker face was (vs. wasn’t) emotionally congruent with the event/sentence. By contrast, the younger adults exhibited such an enhancement with negative stimuli only. Objective: The first aim of the current study was to assess the replicability of these findings with dynamic face stimuli (unfolding from neutral to happy or sad). A second goal was to assess a key prediction made by socio-emotional selectivity theory, viz. that the positivity effect (a preference for positive information) displayed by older adults involves cognitive effort. Method: We conducted an eye-tracking visual-world experiment. Results: Most priming and age effects, including the positivity effects, replicated. However, against our expectations, the positive gaze preference in older adults did not co-vary with a standard measure of cognitive effort - increased pupil dilation. Instead, pupil size was significantly bigger when (both younger and older) adults processed negative than positive stimuli. Conclusion: These findings are in line with previous research on the relationship between positive gaze preferences and pupil dilation. We discuss both theoretical and methodological implications of these results.

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Classroom acoustics: Listening problems in children

Building Acoustics ◽

10.1177/1351010x19886035 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 27 (1) ◽

pp. 47-59 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Flavia Gheller ◽

Elisa Lovo ◽

Athena Arsie ◽

Roberto Bovo

Keyword(s):

Auditory Processing ◽

Signal To Noise Ratio ◽

Cognitive Effort ◽

Listening Skills ◽

Noisy Environments ◽

Acoustic Characteristics ◽

Classroom Acoustics ◽

Acoustic Quality ◽

The Impact

The acoustic quality of classrooms is crucial for children’s listening skills and consequently for their learning. Listening abilities in kids are still developing, and an environment with inadequate acoustic characteristics may create additional problems in speech perception and phonetic recognition. Background noise or reverberation may cause auditory processing problems and greater cognitive effort. There are also other elements which can make difficulty in listening and understanding in noisy environments an even more serious problem, such as learning disabilities, mild to severe hearing loss or bilingualism. Therefore, it is important to improve the acoustic quality of the classrooms, taking into account the specific needs of children in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and reverberation time, in order to ensure a proper quality of listening. The aim of this work is to analyse, through the review of previous studies, the impact that the acoustic of classrooms has on children’s listening skills and learning activities.

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Anticipation and Stuttering: A Pupillographic Study

Journal of Speech and Hearing Research ◽

10.1044/jshr.1204.833 ◽

1969 ◽

Vol 12 (4) ◽

pp. 833-839 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Kenneth C. Gray ◽

Dean E. Williams

Keyword(s):

Auditory Stimulus ◽

Pupil Size ◽

Free Association ◽

Pupil Dilation ◽

Auditory Stimuli ◽

Physiological Changes ◽

Single Word ◽

Pupil Response ◽

Association Response ◽

Pupil Reaction

Changes in pupil size were studied in 24 stuttering and 30 nonstuttering adults during a 4-sec period following the presentation of single-word auditory stimuli and before a signal to respond. Subjects were required first to respond with a single word which was the opposite of the word presented and later to give a one-word free-association response to words of both emotional and neutral connotations. Pupil size was measured also while subjects merely listened to the word stimuli. The process of attending to an auditory stimulus was associated with pupil dilation. Pupil response was significantly greater (in absolute diameter and in dilation) when subjects were required to give an oral response to the stimulus than when they simply listened to the stimulus. Furthermore, the extent of the pupil reaction was related to the nature of the stimulus presented. Such differences in arousal did not occur to any greater degree in stutterers than in nonstutterers. Moreover, among stutterers, measures of pupil size were not predictive of stuttering. Thus, the cues which the stutterer associates with the anticipation of stuttering do not appear to be reflected in the physiological changes associated with pupillary movement.

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Is categorization in visual working memory a way to reduce mental effort? A pupillometry study

10.1101/2021.11.23.469689 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Cherie Zhou ◽

Monicque M. Lorist ◽

Sebastiaan Mathot

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Visual Working Memory ◽

Visual Information ◽

Pupil Size ◽

Mental Effort ◽

Pupil Dilation ◽

General Category ◽

Set Size ◽

Memory Precision ◽

Continuous Representations

Recent studies on visual working memory (VWM) have shown that visual information can be stored in VWM as continuous (e.g., a specific shade of red) as well as categorical representations (e.g., the general category red). It has been widely assumed, yet never directly tested, that continuous representations require more VWM mental effort than categorical representations; given limited VWM capacity, this would mean that fewer continuous, as compared to categorical, representations can be maintained simultaneously. We tested this assumption by measuring pupil size, as a proxy for mental effort, in a delayed estimation task. Participants memorized one to four ambiguous (boundaries between adjacent color categories) or prototypical colors to encourage continuous or categorical representations, respectively; after a delay, a probe indicated the location of the to-be-reported color. We found that, for set size 1, pupil size was larger while maintaining ambiguous as compared to prototypical colors, but without any difference in memory precision; this suggests that participants relied on an effortful continuous representation to maintain a single ambiguous color, thus resulting in pupil dilation while preserving precision. In contrast, for set size 2 and higher, pupil size was equally large while maintaining ambiguous and prototypical colors, but memory precision was now substantially reduced for ambiguous colors; this suggests that participants now also relied on categorical representations for ambiguous colors (which are by definition a poor fit to any category), thus reducing memory precision but not resulting in pupil dilation. Taken together, our results suggest that continuous representations are more effortful than categorical representations, and that very few continuous representations (perhaps only one) can be maintained simultaneously.

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Listener’s personality traits predict changes in pupil size during auditory language comprehension

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-021-84886-3 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Isabell Hubert Lyall ◽

Juhani Järvikivi

Keyword(s):

Personality Traits ◽

Language Processing ◽

Language Comprehension ◽

Pupil Size ◽

Pupil Dilation ◽

Systematic Research ◽

Cognitive Resources ◽

Personality Profiles ◽

Pupillary Responses ◽

Grammatical Errors

AbstractResearch suggests that listeners’ comprehension of spoken language is concurrently affected by linguistic and non-linguistic factors, including individual difference factors. However, there is no systematic research on whether general personality traits affect language processing. We correlated 88 native English-speaking participants’ Big-5 traits with their pupillary responses to spoken sentences that included grammatical errors, "He frequently have burgers for dinner"; semantic anomalies, "Dogs sometimes chase teas"; and statements incongruent with gender stereotyped expectations, such as "I sometimes buy my bras at Hudson's Bay", spoken by a male speaker. Generalized additive mixed models showed that the listener's Openness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism traits modulated resource allocation to the three different types of unexpected stimuli. No personality trait affected changes in pupil size across the board: less open participants showed greater pupil dilation when processing sentences with grammatical errors; and more introverted listeners showed greater pupil dilation in response to both semantic anomalies and socio-cultural clashes. Our study is the first one demonstrating that personality traits systematically modulate listeners’ online language processing. Our results suggest that individuals with different personality profiles exhibit different patterns of the allocation of cognitive resources during real-time language comprehension.

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Cents versus scale steps: Can we tell the difference between major and minor thirds?

Psychology of Music ◽

10.1177/0305735620987272 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 030573562098727

Author(s):

Pedro Neto ◽

Patricia M Vanzella

Keyword(s):

Auditory Processing ◽

Perceptual Quality ◽

Chromatic Scale ◽

Major Scale ◽

Accurate Performance ◽

The Difference ◽

Scale Step ◽

Frequency Ratios ◽

Tonal Context

We report an experiment in which participants ( N = 368) were asked to differentiate between major and minor thirds. These intervals could either be formed by diatonic tones from the C major scale (tonal condition) or by a subset of tones from the chromatic scale (atonal condition). We hypothesized that in the tonal condition intervals would be perceived as a function of scale step distances, which we defined as the number of diatonic leaps between two notes of a given music scale. In the atonal condition, we hypothesized that intervals would be perceived as a function of cents. If our hypotheses were supported, we should verify a less accurate performance in the tonal condition, where scale step distances are the same between major and minor thirds. The data corroborated our hypotheses, and we suggest that acoustic measurements of intervallic distances (i.e., frequency ratios and cents) are not optimal when it comes to describing the perceptual quality of intervals in a tonal context. Finally, our research points to the possibility that, in comparison with previous models, scale steps and cents might better capture the notion of global versus local instances of auditory processing.

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Experimental evaluation of the light sword lens performance with a variable pupil size

Photonics Letters of Poland ◽

10.4302/plp.v10i2.814 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 36 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Walter Torres-Sepúlveda ◽

Alejandro Mira-Agudelo ◽

John Fredy Barrera ◽

Andrzej Kolodziejczyk

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Experimental Study ◽

Pupil Size ◽

Focal Depth ◽

Optical Element ◽

Depth Of Focus ◽

Variable Diameter ◽

Diffraction Structure ◽

Do So

This paper presents an experimental study designed to test the performance of the light sword lens (LSL) with different pupil sizes. To do so, Snellen optotype images obtained by a monofocal lens either with or without an LSL, were compared. Images were obtained for three different pupil sizes at several target vergences. The correlation coefficient and through-focus curves were obtained and compared. The experimental results show differences in the contrast and the depth of focus with different pupil sizes using the monofocal lens without an LSL. In contrast, when using the monofocal lens in combination with the LSL, the quality of the images is similar for all pupils and target vergences used, with slight differences only in halos and contrast. Full Text: PDF ReferencesG. Mikula, Z. Jaroszewicz, A. Kolodziejczyk, K. Petelczyc, M. Sypek, G. P. Agrawal, "Imaging with extended focal depth by means of lenses with radial and angular modulation", Opt Express 15, 9184, (2007). CrossRef A. Kolodziejczyk, S. Bará, Z. Jaroszewicz, M. Sypek, "The Light Sword Optical Element—a New Diffraction Structure with Extended Depth of Focus", J. Mod Opt. 37, 1283, (1990). CrossRef K. Petelczyc et al, "Presbyopia compensation with a light sword optical element of a variable diameter", Photonics Lett. Pol. 1, 55 (2009). DirectLink A. Mira-Agudelo et al, "Compensation of Presbyopia With the Light Sword Lens", Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci 57, 6871, (2016). CrossRef R.A. Fisher, Statistical Methods for Research Workers (New York, Hafner, 13th Ed., 1958) CrossRef

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Subjective Fatigue in Children and Adults

Advances in Psychology, Mental Health, and Behavioral Studies - Handbook of Research on Psychosocial Perspectives of Human Communication Disorders ◽

10.4018/978-1-5225-4955-0.ch010 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 184-208

Author(s):

Saransh Jain ◽

Suma Raju

Keyword(s):

Quality Of Life ◽

Auditory Processing ◽

Cognitive Abilities ◽

Direct Link ◽

Physical Fatigue ◽

Social Emotional ◽

Top Down ◽

Auditory Cognition ◽

The Impact

Fatigue is a common yet poorly understood topic. The psychological, physiological, social, emotional, and cognitive wellbeing of a person may be affected due to fatigue. Despite a century of research in understanding the effect of fatigue on human systems, there is no concrete explanation as how fatigue affects the perception of speech. Fatigue impairs auditory cognition and the reduced cognitive abilities further increase mental and physical fatigue. Since cognition is markedly affected in individuals experiencing mental fatigue, its consequences are widespread. According to the top-down approach of auditory processing, there is a direct link between cognition and speech perception. Thus, in the present chapter, the influence of fatigue on perception is reviewed. It is noted that the impact of fatigue on cognition and quality of life is different for children and adults. Training in music, meditation, and exposure to more than one language are some of the measures that help to reduce the effect of fatigue and improve cognitive abilities in both children as well as in adults.

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Pupil Response: A Psychophysiological Measure of Fear during Analogue Desensitization,

Perceptual and Motor Skills ◽

10.1177/00315125890693-254 ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 69 (3-2) ◽

pp. 1351-1367

Author(s):

Robert S. Sturgeon ◽

Leslie M. Cooper ◽

Robert J. Howell

Keyword(s):

Pupil Size ◽

Pupillary Response ◽

Pupil Response ◽

Current Technology ◽

Pupillary Responses

15 highly aroused snake phobics individually constructed fear hierarchies by selecting colored photographs of snakes. Subjects either imagined fear scenes based on their photographs or were exposed to duplicate projected slides during desensitization. Pupillary responses of the Slide Group were also recorded before, during, and after desensitization. Fear of snakes was significantly reduced for both groups within five or fewer desensitization sessions. Changes in pupil size of the Slide Group appear to reflect arousal of fear as well as reduction of fear after treatment. Current technology makes pupillary response a viable psychophysiological measure of fear.

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