Mark A Schmuckler | University of Toronto (original) (raw)

Papers by Mark A Schmuckler

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Although the relation between tonality and musical memory has been fairly well-studied, less is k... more Although the relation between tonality and musical memory has been fairly well-studied, less is known regarding the contribution of tonal-schematic expectancies to this relation. Three experiments investigated the influence of tonal expectancies on memory for single tones in a tonal melodic context. In the first experiment, listener responses indicated superior recognition of both expected and unexpected targets in a major tonal context than for moderately expected targets. Importantly, and in support of previous work on false memories, listener responses also revealed a higher false alarm rate for expected than unexpected targets. These results indicate roles for tonal schematic congruency as well as distinctiveness in memory for melodic tones. The second experiment utilized minor melodies, which weakened tonal expectancies since the minor tonality can be represented in three forms simultaneously. Finally, tonal expectancies were abolished entirely in the third experiment through the use of atonal melodies. Accordingly, the expectancy-based results observed in the first experiment were disrupted in the second experiment, and disappeared in the third experiment. These results are discussed in light of schema theory, musical expectancy, and classic memory work on the availability and distinctiveness heuristics.

Developmental Science, Feb 17, 2022

Data availability statement: Where permission granted, the raw data (videos) from this experiment... more Data availability statement: Where permission granted, the raw data (videos) from this experiment are stored at Databrary.com (volume 1129). The aggregate, anonymized data and code will be stored in an Open Science Framework repository for independent verification of the results (https://osf.io/j8tkr/) Funding statement: This research was funded by an NSERC Discovery Grant (RGPIN-2019-04689) to LKC Conflict of interest disclosure: The authors have no conflicts of interest to report. Ethics approval statement: All procedures were approved by the University of Toronto Research Ethics Board.

$Research paper thumbnail of Discrimination of auditory fractal contours$

Child Development, Aug 1, 2001

Three experiments explored 5-and 7-month-old infants' intermodal coordination of proprioceptive i... more Three experiments explored 5-and 7-month-old infants' intermodal coordination of proprioceptive information produced by leg movements, and visual movement information specifying these same motions. The visual information took the form of point light information for leg and feet movements, with visual displays presented in upright, ego-centered on-joint (Experiment 1, N ϭ 48); upright, ego-centered off-joint (Experiment 2, N ϭ 48); and inverted, observer-centered off-joint (Experiment 3, N ϭ 48) orientations. Measures of preferential looking indicated intermodal perception in infants of both ages while seeing on-joint, egocentered orientations, and for 7-month-olds (and possibly 5-month-olds) while seeing off-joint, ego-centered displays; neither age group demonstrated intermodal perception for off-joint, observer-centered displays. These results suggest that coordination of visual and proprioceptive inputs is constrained by infants' information processing of the displays, and have implications for infants' growing understanding of their self-movement and the development of knowledge of the self.

Cognition, Sep 1, 2021

Social interactions often involve a cluttered multisensory scene consisting of multiple talking f... more Social interactions often involve a cluttered multisensory scene consisting of multiple talking faces. We investigated whether audiovisual temporal synchrony can facilitate perceptual segregation of talking faces. Participants either saw four identical or four different talking faces producing temporally jittered versions of the same visible speech utterance and heard the audible version of the same speech utterance. The audible utterance was either synchronized with the visible utterance produced by one of the talking faces or not synchronized with any of them. Eye tracking indicated that participants exhibited a marked preference for the synchronized talking face, that they gazed more at the mouth than the eyes overall, that they gazed more at the eyes of an audiovisually synchronized than a desynchronized talking face, and that they gazed more at the mouth when all talking faces were audiovisually desynchronized. These findings demonstrate that audiovisual temporal synchrony plays a major role in perceptual segregation of multisensory clutter and that adults rely on differential scanning strategies of a talker's eyes and mouth to discover sources of multisensory coherence.

Frontiers in Psychology, Aug 24, 2022

By early childhood, children possess clear expectations about how resources should be, and typica... more By early childhood, children possess clear expectations about how resources should be, and typically are, distributed, expecting and advocating for equal resource distributions to recipients. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that children may be able to use deviations from equality in resource distributions to make inferences about the nature of social relationships. Here, we investigated whether children use partiality in resource distributions displayed by adults toward children in third-party contexts to identify parent-child relationships, whether children anticipate preferential treatment based upon knowledge of third-party parent-child relationships, and whether children anticipate different emotional reactions to impartiality in resource distributions in parent-child interactions compared to neighbor-child interactions. Four-to seven-year-old children were presented with hypothetical vignettes about an adult character who distributed resources to two children either equally, or systematically favoring one child. By the age of 4, children used resource distribution partiality to identify an adult as a child's parent, and also used these expectations to guide their anticipated emotional reactions to impartiality. By the age of 6, children were also more likely to anticipate partiality to be displayed in parent-child compared to neighbor-child relationships. The findings from the current study reveal that partiality in resource distributions acts as a valuable cue to aid in identifying and understanding social relationships, highlighting the integral role that resources play in children's understanding of their social world. More broadly, our findings support the claim that children use cues that signal interpersonal investment to specify and evaluate parent-child relationships in third-party contexts.

Oxford University Press eBooks, Jul 18, 2023

Infant Behavior & Development, Apr 1, 1998

One critical skill to emerge over the first years of life is the ability to orient one's self spa... more One critical skill to emerge over the first years of life is the ability to orient one's self spatially. Spatial orientation has often been tested using a modified Stage IV search task, in which children are encouraged to retrieve a toy hidden in one of two locations. Prior to searching for this toy, children experience either self-movement to a different position, or object-movement in which the toy is moved relative to the child's position. Results from these studies have found more accurate search following self-movement, relative to object movement. One key distinction between these situations is that selfmovement produces both visual and body movement information for spatial updating, whereas objectmovement produces visual information only. Thus, the superior search found after self-movement may result from the availability of multiple inputs for spatial updating. Unfortunately, no work has thoroughly explored the role of single versus multiple information sources on spatial orientation.

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, May 1, 1995

Developmental Psychology, Jul 1, 2023

Gait & Posture, Jun 1, 2019

Background Previous work on balance control in children and adults highlights the importance of m... more Background Previous work on balance control in children and adults highlights the importance of multisensory information. Work in this vein has examined two principal input sourcesthe role of visual and haptic information on balance. Recent work has explored the impact of a different form of haptic inputobject holdingon balance in young infants. Research question This experiment examined the impact of simultaneous visual input and haptic input on balance in children and adults, employing two novel forms of haptic input. Methods Static balance was measured in 3-5 year olds, 7-9 year olds, and young adults, in the presence of all possible combinations of manipulated visual input (eyes open, eyes closed) and haptic input (no touch, object hold, touch an unstable support, touch a stable support). Results Analysis of postural stability (mean velocity) indicated that stability was influenced by visual input, haptic input, and age group. For visual input stability increased in eyes open versus eyes closed conditions. For haptic input, stability systematically increased with increasing levels of fixed haptic input (e.g., no touch, object hold, unstable touch, stable touch). Stability also increased as a function of increasing age group. There were no interactions between the factors. Significance The finding that the two novel forms of haptic inputobject hold and touch with an unstable support surfaceincreased stability relative to no touch input, but not as much as touch with a stable support, indicates that children use haptic information in a self-referential fashion for controlling posture. The failure to observe any interactions between visual and haptic inputs with age suggests that multisensory processing is generally additive across development, and has implications for the occurrence of sensory weighting across developmental epochs.

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015

Melody is the most ubiquitous form of musical structure with which listeners come into contact on... more Melody is the most ubiquitous form of musical structure with which listeners come into contact on a daily basis. Mirroring the prevalence and importance of melody, research in music cognition has focused extensively on the processes involved in perceiving and remembering melodic structure. Despite these years of study, however, our understanding of pitch structure in melody can be described simply, with respect to the two components of tonality and pitch contour. Although the importance of these two components has been recognized over the years, it is only recently that workable models of these components have been proposed. This chapter describes such models of tonality and melodic contour, and discusses the role of these components in listeners' perceptions of and memory for melody.

Memory & Cognition, 2019

In typical Western music, important pitches occur disproportionately often on important beats, re... more In typical Western music, important pitches occur disproportionately often on important beats, referred to as the tonal-metric hierarchy (Prince & Schmuckler, 2014, Music Perception, 31, 254-270). We tested whether listeners are sensitive to this alignment of pitch and temporal structure. In Experiment 1, the stimuli were 200 artificial melodies with random pitch contours; all melodies had both a regular beat and a pitch class distribution that favored one musical key, but had either high or low agreement with the tonal-metric hierarchy. Thirty-two listeners rated the goodness of each melody, and another 41 listeners rated the melodies' metric clarity (how clear the beat was). The tonal-metric hierarchy did not affect either rating type, likely because the melodies may have only weakly (at best) established a musical key. In Experiment 2, we shuffled the pitches in 60 composed melodies (scrambling pitch contour, but not rhythm) to generate versions with high and low agreement with the tonal-metric hierarchy. Both ratings of goodness (N = 40) and metric clarity (N = 40) revealed strong evidence of the tonal-metric hierarchy influencing ratings; there was no effect of musical training. In Experiment 3, we phase-shifted, rather than shuffled, the pitches from the composed melodies, thus preserving pitch contour. Both rating types (goodness N = 43, metric clarity N = 32) replicated the results of Experiment 2. These findings establish the psychological reality of the tonal-metric hierarchy.

Human Movement Science

Maintaining balance is fundamentally a multisensory process, with visual, haptic, and propriocept... more Maintaining balance is fundamentally a multisensory process, with visual, haptic, and proprioceptive information all playing an important role in postural control. The current project examined the interaction between such sensory inputs, manipulating visual (presence versus absence), haptic (presence versus absence of contact with a stable or unstable finger support surface), and proprioceptive (varying stance widths, including shoulder width stance, Chaplin [heels together, feet splayed at approximately 60°] stance, feet together stance, and tandem stance) information. Analyses of mean velocity of the Centre of Pressure (CoP) revealed significant interactions between these factors, with stability gains observed as a function of increasing sensory information (e.g., visual, haptic, visual + haptic), although the nature of these gains was modulated by the proprioceptive information and the reliability of the haptic support surface (i.e., unstable versus stable finger supports). Subsequent analyses on individual difference parameters (e.g., height, leg length, weight, and areas of base of support) revealed that these variables were significantly related to postural measures across experimental conditions. These findings are discussed relative to their implications for multisensory postural control, and with respect to inverted pendulum models of balance. (185 words).