Children's perception of certain musical properties: scale and contour

Children's perception of scale and contour in melodies was investigated in five studies. Experimental tasks included judging transposed renditions of melodies (Studies 1 and 3), discriminating between transposed renditions of a melody (Study 2), judging contour-preserving transformations of melodies (Study 4), and judging similarity to a familiar target melody of transformations preserving rhythm or rhythm and contour (Study 5). The first and second studies showed that young children detect key transposition changes even in familiar melodies and they perceive similarity over key transpositions even in unfamiliar melodies. Young children also are sensitive to melodic contour over transformations that preserve it (Study 5), yet they distinguish spontaneously between melodies with the same contour and different intervals (Study 4). The key distance effect reported in the literature did not occur in the tasks of this investigation (Studies 1 and 3), and it may be apparent only for melodies shorter or more impoverished than those used here.     

Separability and integrality of global and local levels of hierarchical patterns

We used a constrained classification task to examine the perceptual relations between global and local levels in hierarchical patterns composed of many, relatively small elements and those composed of few, relatively large elements. In Experiments 1 and 3 subjects were asked to make classifications based on "form" or "texture." In Experiments 2 and 4 they were asked to classify according to the "shape" of the configuration or the elements. The results indicate that configural and elemental levels are perceptually separable for many-element patterns when processed as form and texture: Subjects could attend to either level without being affected by variation along the irrelevant dimension. However, when the same many-element patterns were processed for global and local shape, subjects could not selectively attend to either level. For few-element patterns, global configuration and local elements appeared to be perceptually integral dimensions. These results are relevant to two issues: the global precedence hypothesis and the explanations of integral and separable dimensions.     

Children's assumptions about the generalizability of sex-typed abilities

Children (mean age = 103 months) were provided with information about the relative abilities of two stimulus children at a specific activity. They then were asked to predict which child would likely be superior at a second highly related activity. The two stimulus children were either same sex or opposite sex, and the activities in each pair were sex typed as male or female. The design was a 2 (sex of subject) × 2 (age of subject) × 4 (stimulus pair—MM, FF, MF, FM) × 2 (sex type of activities) mixed design, with sex of subject and age of subject as the between-subjects factors. Each child responded to 32 instances, representing four replications of eight possible combinations. The dependent variable was the child's choice of the initially superior child or initially inferior child as better at the second activity. The prediction was that children would be less likely to assume that superiority could generalize to a second activity if the initial superiority contradicted sexstereotyped expectations. This result would indicate that sex stereotypes interfere with inferences processes, supporting a scehmatic model of sex stereotyping. The results were consistent with the prediction. Compared to a baseline condition in which sex stereotypes were not relevant, children were less likely to choose the initially superior child when the sex stereotype had been violated, and more likely to select that child when it had been confirmed.     

The effects of perceptual set on the shape and apparent depth of subjective contours

Two experiments showed the influence of perceptual set on the perception of subjective contours. In the first, the perceived shape of a subjective-contour figure (a minimal version of the Ehrenstein configuration) was varied by altering the observer’s viewing set. The second experiment showed that apparent depth emerged in subjective-contour figures when observers were set to perceive the illusory contours.     

The number of ways to label a structure

It has been observed that the number of different ways in which a graph withp points can be labelled isp! divided by the number of symmetries, and that this holds regardless of the species of structure at hand. In this note, a simple group-theoretic proof is provided.This work was supported by Grant MH 10834 from the National Institute of Mental Health.