The Musical Stroop Effect

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 2015

Most earlier studies investigating the evolution of the Stroop effect with the amount of reading practice have reported data consistent with an inverted U-shaped curve, whereby the Stroop effect appears early during reading acquisition, reaches a peak after 2 or 3 years of practice, and then continuously decreases until adulthood. The downward component of the curve suggests that skilled performers would be able to control their performance better than less-skilled performers. However, in these studies, the level of reading practice entirely coincides with age due to obvious practical and ethical constraints, and it is possible that the observed reduction in the Stroop interference is due to a growing ability of older children to inhibit nonrelevant information. In the present study, word reading, as source of interference, was replaced by note naming in musicians. The major advantage is that musical training can be easily decoupled from age. In 2 experiments exploiting the musical ...

Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie), 2014

Grégoire, Perruchet, and Poulin-Charronnat (2013) claimed that the Musical Stroop task, which reveals the automaticity of note naming in musician experts, provides a new tool for studying the development of automatisms through extensive training in natural settings. Many of the criticisms presented in the four commentaries published in this issue appear to be based on a misunderstanding of our procedure, or questionable postulates. We maintain that the Musical Stroop Effect offers promising possibilities for further research on automaticity, with the main proviso that the current procedure makes it difficult to tease apart facilitation and interference.

Atten Percept Psychophys, 2003

Anecdotal evidence has suggested that musical notation can trigger auditory images. Expert musicians silently read scores containing well-known themes embedded into the notation of an embellished phrase and judged if a tune heard aloud thereafter was the original theme (i.e., melodic target) or not (i.e., melodic lure). Three experiments were conducted employing four score-reading conditions: normal nondistracted reading, concurrent rhythmic distraction, phonatory interference, and obstruction by auditory stimuli. The findings demonstrate that phonatory interference impaired recognition of original themes more than did the other conditions. We propose that notational audiation is the silent reading of musical notation resulting in auditory imagery. The research suggests that it also elicits kinesthetic-like phonatory processes.

Psychology of Music, 2020

Does seeing music notation activate the motor systems of expert musicians in preparation for playing, even when they do not have an instrument to play? Trombonists, non-trombonist musicians, and non-musicians were asked to indicate whether the second note of a visually presented two-note sequence was higher or lower than the first note. Participants responded by moving a joystick forward for “ higher” and backward for “ lower” or by pressing a button in the top or bottom row, respectively, of a computer keyboard. We examined response time as a function of whether the direction of movement required by the task was the same ( congruent) or different ( incongruent) from the direction of movement of a trombone slide when playing the same notes on the trombone. For trombonists, responses were faster for congruent than for incongruent trials for the joystick, but not for the keyboard. There was no effect of congruency for non-trombonists for joystick or keyboard responses. The trombone co...

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2008

This study investigated the mental representation of music notation. Notational audiation is the ability to internally "hear" the music one is reading before physically hearing it performed on an instrument. In earlier studies, the authors claimed that this process engages music imagery contingent on subvocal silent singing. This study refines the previously developed embedded melody task and further explores the phonatory nature of notational audiation with throat-audio and larynx-electromyography measurement. Experiment 1 corroborates previous findings and confirms that notational audiation is a process engaging kinesthetic-like covert excitation of the vocal folds linked to phonatory resources. Experiment 2 explores whether covert rehearsal with the mind's voice also involves actual motor processing systems and suggests that the mental representation of music notation cues manual motor imagery. Experiment 3 verifies findings of both Experiments 1 and 2 with a sample of professional drummers. The study points to the profound reliance on phonatory and manual motor processing-a dual-route stratagem-used during music reading. Further implications concern the integration of auditory and motor imagery in the brain and cross-modal encoding of a unisensory input.

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2009

Linguistic processing, especially syntactic processing, is often considered a hallmark of human cognition; thus, the domain specificity or domain generality of syntactic processing has attracted considerable debate. The present experiments address this issue by simultaneously manipulating syntactic processing demands in language and music. Participants performed self-paced reading of garden path sentences, in which structurally unexpected words cause temporary syntactic processing difficulty. A musical chord accompanied each sentence segment, with the resulting sequence forming a coherent chord progression. When structurally unexpected words were paired with harmonically unexpected chords, participants showed substantially enhanced garden path effects. No such interaction was observed when the critical words violated semantic expectancy or when the critical chords violated timbral expectancy. These results support a prediction of the shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (Patel, 2003), which suggests that music and language draw on a common pool of limited processing resources for integrating incoming elements into syntactic structures. Notations of the stimuli from this study may be downloaded from pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Neurocase, 2006

This study reports three cases of synaesthesia who experience colors in response to written musical notation, graphemes and heard music. The synaesthetes show Stroop-like interference when asked to name the colour of graphemes but not for written musical notes. However, reliable interference is found in two further studies that require deeper processing of the musical notation (namely playing music from colored notation, and naming the synaesthetic color of the notes whilst suppressing the veridical color). This is the first empirical demonstration of synaesthesia for musical notation. The fact that synaesthetic color influences music playing/reading (a sensory-motor transformation) but not verbal color naming suggests that synaesthetic Stroop effects can arise from processing the meaning of a stimulus and not just as a result of verbal response interference. However, it is likely that the color associations themselves have a developmental origin in the names assigned to them. In al...

Acta Psychologica, 2020

The Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) suggests the existence of an association between number magnitude and response location, with faster left key-press responses to small numbers and faster right key-press responses to large numbers. We investigated whether a similar association exists between musical notes on the stave and the space of response execution, involving amateur and expert musicians (Experiment 1). Moreover, in Experiment 2 we further investigated such association in two groups of expert musicians (piano and transverse flute players) who differ in the note mapping on their instruments. Results indicate a clear association between musical notes and the space of response execution only for musicians with formal education. Furthermore, this association seems not to be influenced by the specific instrument played, as both piano and transverse flute players showed the same effect direction (left key-press advantage for low notes, and vice versa).

Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 2010

Holistic processing (i.e., the tendency to process objects as wholes) is associated with face perception and also with expertise individuating novel objects. Surprisingly, recent work also reveals holistic effects in novice observers. It is unclear whether the same mechanisms support holistic effects in experts and in novices. In the present study, we measured holistic processing of music sequences using a selective attention task in participants who vary in music-reading expertise. We found that holistic effects were strategic in novices but were relatively automatic in experts. Correlational analyses revealed that individual holistic effects were predicted by both individual music-reading ability and neural responses for musical notation in the right fusiform face area (rFFA), but in opposite directions for experts and novices, suggesting that holistic effects in the two groups may be of different natures. To characterize expert perception, it is important not only to measure the tendency to process objects as wholes, but also to test whether this effect is dependent on task constraints.

Restorative neurology …, 2007

Purpose: We review a series of experiments aimed at studying pitch processing in music and speech. These studies were conducted with musician and non musician adults and children. We found that musical expertise improved pitch processing not only in music but also in speech. Demonstrating transfer of training between music and language has interesting applications for second language learning. We also addressed the issue of whether the positive effects of musical expertise are linked with specific predispositions for music or with extensive musical practice. Results of longitudinal studies argue for the later. Finally, we also examined pitch processing in dyslexic children and found that they had difficulties discriminating strong pitch changes that are easily discriminate by normal readers. These results argue for a strong link between basic auditory perception abilities and reading abilities. Methods: We used conjointly the behavioral method (Reaction Times and error rates) and the electrophysiological method (recording of the changes in brain electrical activity time-locked to stimulus presentation, Event-Related brain Potentials or ERPs). Results: A set of common processes may be responsible for pitch processing in music and in speech and these processes are shaped by musical practice. Conclusion: These data add evidence in favor of brain plasticity and open interesting perspectives for the remediation of dyslexia using musical training.