Articulation effects in melody recognition memory

Abstract

Various surface features—timbre, tempo, and pitch—influence melody recognition memory, but articulation format effects, if any, remain unknown. For the first time, these effects were examined. In Experiment 1, melodies that remained in the same, or appeared in a different but similar, articulation format from study to test were recognized better than were melodies that were presented in a distinct format at test. A similar articulation format adequately induced matching processes to enhance recognition. Experiment 2 revealed that melodies rated as perceptually dissimilar on the basis of the location of the articulation mismatch did not impair recognition performance, suggesting an important boundary condition for articulation format effects on memory recognition—the matching of the memory trace and recognition probe may depend more on the overall proportion, rather than the temporal location, of the mismatch. The present findings are discussed in terms of a global matching advantage hypothesis.

Keywords:

• Melody recognition memory
• Articulation format effects
• Global matching advantage

Notes

¹ Undergraduate students at the National University of Singapore are aged between 18 and 25 years, although we did not collect these data explicitly.

² The approximations were derived with the Euclidean geometric equation for distance between two points in a plane: distance = √[(x ₁ – x ₂)² + (y ₁ – y ₂)²], in which (x ₁ y ₁) and (x ₂ y ₂) are planar coordinates for Points 1 and 2, respectively.