Distractor familiarity reveals the importance of configural information in musical notation

The study of perceptual expertise in a visual domain requires the definition of boundaries for the objects that are part of the domain in question. Unlike other well-studied domains, such as faces or words, the domain of musical notation has been lacking in efforts to identify critical features that define the objects of music reading. In the present study, we took advantage of the distractor familiarity effect in visual search. We asked participants to search for a prespecified target note among familiar/unfamiliar distractor notes when two features of musical notation, dot-stem configuration (the way of connecting the dot and the stem of a note) and connectedness (whether or not the dot and the stem of a note were connected), were manipulated. A participant's level of music-reading expertise predicted the magnitude of the distractor familiarity effect only when the dot-stem configuration was diagnostic for the search. Connectedness did not induce a distractor familiarity effect, regardless of its diagnosticity. Dot-stem configuration is a defining feature of music notes, helping to characterize the boundaries of the domain of music-reading expertise. This work has also improved on the tasks used to quantify expertise in reading musical notation.