Ideomotor effects of pitch on continuation tapping

Abstract

The ideomotor principle predicts that perception will modulate action where overlap exists between perceptual and motor representations of action. This effect is demonstrated with auditory stimuli. Previous perceptual evidence suggests that pitch contour and pitch distance in tone sequences may elicit tonal motion effects consistent with listeners' implicit awareness of the lawful dynamics of locomotive bodies. To examine modulating effects of perception on action, participants in a continuation tapping task produced a steady tempo. Auditory tones were triggered by each tap. Pitch contour randomly and persistently varied within trials. Pitch distance between successive tones varied between trials. Although participants were instructed to ignore them, tones systematically affected finger dynamics and timing. Where pitch contour implied positive acceleration, the following tap and the intertap interval (ITI) that it completed were faster. Where pitch contour implied negative acceleration, the following tap and the ITI that it completed were slower. Tempo was faster with greater pitch distance. Musical training did not predict the magnitude of these effects. There were no generalized effects on timing variability. Pitch contour findings demonstrate how tonal motion may elicit the spontaneous production of accents found in expressive music performance.

Keywords:

• Ideomotor
• Pitch contour
• Pitch distance
• Continuation tapping

We are grateful for the helpful comments of Werner Goebl, Caroline Palmer, Bruno Repp, and three anonymous reviewers on earlier versions of the manuscript and Peter Pfordresher at a conference presentation of these data.

Notes

¹ Boltz (1998) offered an alternative interpretation of her findings for pitch contour that were based on musical structure. She suggested that participants may have “overgeneralized” certain pitch/timing structural associations learned from exposure to Western music, and that CC tones in music are often of prolonged duration compositionally and/or in expressive performance, functioning as melodic accents. Thus, she argues that participants may have imposed these expectancies onto the isochronous stimuli. This issue was addressed in the current study by testing the robustness of the pitch contour/tempo interaction in unstructured tonal sequences rather than musical melodies. Moreover, where the stimuli in Boltz's study were composed of the tones of a C major scale, the current study used pitch distances not found in Western scale structures (150 cents) and that are smaller (25 and 50 cents) or larger (350 cents) than the pitch distances occurring most frequently between tones in Western melodies (Huron 2001; Vos & Troost, 1989). In addition, whereas in Boltz's study (a) the proportion of CC to CP tones within a sequence did not exceed 1:3, and (b) each CC tone was always flanked by CP tones (thus potentially conflating their perceptual salience), in the current study both contour types were presented randomly, roughly equiprobably, and could occur in succession.