Priming in melody perception: tracking down the strength of cognitive expectations

The musical priming paradigm has shown facilitated processing for tonally related over less-related targets. However, the congruence between tonal relatedness and the psychoacoustical properties of music challenges cognitive interpretations of the involved processes. Our goal was to show that cognitive expectations (based on listeners' tonal knowledge) elicit tonal priming in melodies independently of sensory components (e.g., spectral overlap). A first priming experiment minimized sensory components by manipulating tonal relatedness with a single note change in the melodies. Processing was facilitated for related over less-related target tones, but an auditory short-term memory model succeeded in simulating this effect, thus suggesting a sensory-based explanation. When the same melodies were played with pure tones (instead of piano tones), the sensory model failed to differentiate between related and less-related targets, while listeners' data continued to show a tonal relatedness effect (Experiment 2). The tonal priming effect observed here thus provides strong evidence for the influence of listeners' tonal knowledge on music processing. The overall findings point out the need for controlled musical material (and notably beyond tone repetition) to study cognitive components in music perception.