Discrimination of tonal sequences composed of repeated temporal patterns.
Toktam Sadralodabai, Robert D. Sorkin · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1992
The discrimination of rhythmic and nonrhythmic temporal patterns was investigated. Two sequences of 12 tones were presented successively (tone duration=25 ms, frequency=1000 Hz). The temporal pattern of each sequence was defined by the time intervals between the tones. The task was to report whether the two sequences had the same or different temporal patterns. According to the pattern correlation model [R. D. Sorkin, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 87, 1695–1701 (1990)], listeners perform the task by computing the correlation between the two temporal patterns. In the current experiment, two aspects of these sequences were manipulated: (a) the correlation between the two 12-tone temporal patterns, and (b) the rhythmicity of the sequences, which we define as the correlation between the temporal patterns of successive 4-tone subsequences within a 12-tone sequence. Listeners’ performance increased with the rhythmicity of the sequences. Performance was above the level predicted by a simple extension of the pattern correlation model [Work supported by AFOSR.]