Context effects in reproduction and perception of song tempo

Studies of tempo perception suggest that exposure to a distribution of predominantly faster or slower versions of a song can shift one's memory for the original tempo toward the contextual tempos. Three experiments were conducted to examine whether similar assimilation effects would occur when participants are asked to reproduce the tempo of a song from memory. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants listened to a tempo-altered version of a pop song prior to tapping out the original tempo from memory on each trial. Reproduced tempos assimilated toward the immediately preceding tempo, but there was no evidence of global assimilation toward the mean of the distribution of tempos. However, Experiment 2 demonstrated a partial dissociation between perception and production, with the same participants showing large assimilation effects derived from comparative judgments but not from tempo reproduction. In Experiment 3, participants listened to and then tapped out the beat of a tempo-altered version before reproducing the original from memory on each trial, which resulted in a global assimilation effect in reproduction. The results of these experiments highlight that contextual bias in memory for tempo depends on the match between the context and the task, with differential effects for perceptual and motor contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).