Abstract
Participants reproduced target intervals of 6–24 sec with finger taps, with target intervals presented before each of 30 reproductions. During the presentation of the target and reproduction, nonmusician participants were asked to count, sing, or do nothing. In another part of the experiment, musicians were asked to count or sing. Segmentation, either by song or count, minimized deviations from targets and reduced the coefficient of variation (CV) to one third of the nonmusicians’ CVs in the no-segmentation condition. The mean deviation from target was significantly lower for musicians than for nonmusicians, as were the musicians’ CVs (half the value of the nonmusicians). Most importantly, although the CV of nonmusicians was invariant over the range of intervals conforming to a strict scalar property, it decreased significantly for musicians as target intervals increased.
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Portions of this experiment were presented at the 18th Annual Meeting of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) held in New York in May 2006, and other portions at the 2009 APS meeting held in San Francisco. The present research was supported by research grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) to S.G. and by NSF Grand IBN 0236821 to P.R.K.
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Grondin, S., Killeen, P.R. Tracking time with song and count: Different Weber functions for musicians and nonmusicians. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 71, 1649–1654 (2009). https://doi.org/10.3758/APP.71.7.1649
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/APP.71.7.1649