Research On Attention and Rhythmicity

Purpose

The Research On Attention and Rhythmicity Laboratory is a psychological laboratory dedicated to the study of timing in attention, perception, and memory. To study timing, we manipulate variables such as tempo (rate) and rhythm (durational patterning) in psychological tasks that use as stimuli sequences of elements (elements may be tones, acoustical sounds or even visual items). The role of time and the effect of variables such as tempo and rhythm on behavior of people is often overlooked in many studies on attention, perception and memory. Our lab mission is to concentrate on this topic. We are interested in discovering if and how temporal variables may affect attention. The most common approach to the role of time and attention posits that time intervals determine masking effects, processing efficiency, encoding accuracy and other activities that consume time. In this lab, we consider the possibility that temporal properties may also guide attending in situations where a temporal context is provided. Accordingly much of our research addresses the role of temporal variables as they participate in some ecologically meaningful context. In principle, we can use many different task to study this; in practice the tasks we have used are designed to answer specific questions, usually about attention.

cat decoration Here is a sample of some questions we have addressed.

"How do people detect small time changes in rate modulated patterns?"

And

"What effect does rhythmic complexity have on time discrimination?"

And

"How does accent structure of a melody affect one's ability to monitor that tune?"

And

"Can the rhythm of a melody affect how accurately one recognizes the pitch of its tones?"

Goals

Two related goals define activities at ROAR:

First, we aim to learn more about the ways in which timing variables affect performance in certain tasks. This means our experiments are designed to systematically vary stimulus properties of sequences such as tempo, tempo modulations, rhythm, accent patterns, and so forth.

Second, we aim to build psychological models which both describe our current findings and provide a trajectory for future research. This means we posit internal psychological structures with certain properties that may explain the pattern of behaviors we observe in our experiments when people are asked to respond to auditory (or visual) patterns containing stimulus timing manipulations.

These models often posit the existence of internal attending rhythms.

In the long run, we aim to develop models of oscillatory attending activities which explain how people follow events such as music and speech in real time.

Recent theory and research suggests we can successfully describe the behaviors of attending rhythms in terms of entrainment and related constructs in dynamical systems theory. A select bibliography of papers by Mari Jones is given on her page