Dear Dario,
there is the old idea of a perceptual present – or ”specious present” in the words of William James (The principles of psychology, 1890). Slightly more recent is the related concept “the phonological loop” (Baddeley, 1992, Science, 255, 556-559). It remains unclear what, exactly, such temporary storages retain, and how they extend in time. This is clearly an understudied phenomenon.
Baddeley seemed early on to envision a veridical memory for sound, i.e. like a tape-recorder. But it would seem inefficient to have a fixed time-limit for such a memory, as it might “break off” just before the end of a verbal or musical phrase, and thus miss the essential meaning. But if it were flexible in duration, it could not only be a stupid tape-recorder, but must somehow process the information continuously to predict relevant time periods and adjust the duration accordingly. The question is then on what principles this fast, automatic feature-analysis operates, and how it reduces information. One could, for example, conceive an information-reducing mechanism that predicts how much information (i.e. non-reduction) and how long chunks of information to retain and possibly “pass on” to other processing (lexical, grammatical, harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, etc.)
Some useful introductory texts:
Bregman, A. S. (1993). Auditory scene analysis: hearing in complex environments. In S.McAdams & E. Bigand (Eds.), Thinking in sound. The cognitive psychology of human audition (pp. 10-36). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
Dunlap, K. (1911). Rhythm and the specious present. Journal of Philosophical, Psychological and Scientific Method, 8, 348-354.
Fraisse, P. (1963). The psychology of time. New York: Harper.
Fraisse, P. (1978). Time and rhythm perception. In E.C.Carterette & M. P. Friedman (Eds.), Handbook of perception (Vol. 8). (8 ed., pp. 203-254). New York: Academic press.
Fraisse, P. (1982). Rhythm and tempo. In D.Deutsch (Ed.), The psychology of music (pp. 149-180). London: Academic Press.
Fraisse, P. (1984). Perception and estimation of time. Annual Review of Psychology, 35, 1-36.
Madison, G. (2001). Functional modelling of the human timing mechanism. PhD Thesis. Uppsala: Uppsala University Library.
Michon, J. A. (1978). The making of the present. A tutorial review. In J.E.Requin (Ed.), Attention and performance (pp. 89-111). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Pöppel, E. (1978). Time Perception. In R.Held, H. W. Leibowitz, & H.-L. Teuber (Eds.), Handbook of Sensory Physiology, Vol 8 (pp. 713-729).
Pöppel, E. (1997). A hierarchical model of temporal perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1, 56-61.
Wallin, J. E. W. (1911). Experimental studies of rhythm and time. I. Qualitative limens or grades of rhythm, and the difference limen in the perception of time. Psychological Review, 18, 100-131.
Wallin, J. E. W. (1911). Experimental studies of rhythm and time. II.The preferred length of interval (tempo). Psychological Review, 18, 202-222.
Woodrow, H. (1951). Time perception. In S.S.Stevens (Ed.), Handbook of experimental psychology (pp. 1224-1236). New York: Wiley.
And here are some empirical studies. I think that repeated noise is one very useful method to examine the nature of this “present” in more detail, as explored somewhat by Warren and colleagues.
Madison, G. & Delignières, D. (2009). Auditory feedback affects the long-range correlation of isochronous serial interval production. Support for a closed-loop or memory model of timing. Experimental Brain Research, 193, 519-527.
Mates, J., Radil, T., Müller, U., & Pöppel, E. (1994). Temporal integration in sensorimotor synchronization. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 6, 332-340.
Michon, J. A. (1964). Studies on subjective duration: I. Differential sensitivity in the perception of repeated temporal intervals. Acta Psychologica, 22, 441-450.
Brubaker, B. S. & Warren, R. M. (1987). Detection of infratonal repetition of frozen noise: Singularity recognition or pattern recognition? Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 82, S93.
Warren, R. M., Gardner, D. A., Brubaker, B. S., & Bashford, J. A. (1991). Melodic and nonmelodic sequences of tones: effects of duration on perception. Music Perception, 8, 277-290.
Warren, R. M. (1993). Perception of acoustic sequences: global integration versus temporal resolution. In S.McAdams & E. Bigand (Eds.), Thinking in sound. The cognitive psychology of human audition (pp. 37-68). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception [mailto:AUDITORY@LISTS.MCGILL.
CA ] On Behalf Of Dario Sanfilippo
Sent: den 1 februari 2017 15:40
To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Maximum temporal window for pattern recognition and the perception of redundancy
Hello, dear list.
I would like to ask you a couple of questions and I will be very grateful if you could help me. It would be great to be pointed out to specific publications, thank you so much in advance for that.
The first question is on the maximum temporal window for the recognition of patterns in long-term audio events. Generally speaking, what is the largest (temporal) distance between audio events so that we can still process such events as interrelated? As an example, let's assume to have a sequence of different pitches equally spaced in time; what is the largest possible distance between them to still be able to perceive a melody?
The second question is on the perception of redundancy in relatively complex (i.e., dynamical equilibrium) long-term audio events. As an example, think of the sound of the sea: its internal structure is never the same although it keeps a strong identity from a global point of view. I believe that this is highly dependent on both the cultural background of the listener as well as the degree of complexity of the audio event itself, but is there any study which tries to relate the perception of redundancy (i.e., the moment in which the listener's attention drops) with a specific temporal window? And is there a connection or similarity between this window and the one described in my first question?
Thank you and best wishes.
Dario