Abstract
To study the relation of pitch and duration processing in reading musical notation, a Stroop-like task was used by 20 non-musicians. A probe display was presented before each target note. Participants were required to process the tonal and metric information of the probe and then to make a match or mismatch decision between probe and target. The target's color informed participants which dimension (pitch or duration) required analysis. The congruity of the irrelevant dimension of the target was manipulated to examine the effect on the relevant dimension. The interference effect of the irrelevant dimension on the relevant dimension was obvious for number of errors and reaction times. This result is consistent with pitch and duration being processed interdependently and reconciles with the theory of dynamic attention.
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