Picking up the pace: effects of global temporal context on sensitivity to the tempo of auditory sequences

Abstract

This article continues a line of research examining factors affecting listeners' auditory tempo sensitivities. Of particular interest is the question of whether listeners are sensitive to the overall (global) pace of their auditory environment and how this sensitivity may affect their perceptions of sequence timing. To address this question, we manipulated the set of sequence tempi (between 300 and 700 msec) that listeners experienced over the course of a 1-h period (i.e., the global temporal context) while they performed a tempo-discrimination task involving standard-comparison pairs of isochronous tone sequences. Overall findings show systematic distortions in perceived tempo that are consistent with the view that listeners adapt to the global pace of their auditory environments. Moreover, general support was found for the hypothesis that increasing the number of equal intervals in a standard sequence produces greater improvements in tempo sensitivity when the standard sequence tempo is different from the global pace than when it is at the global pace. Implications of these findings for models of timing and temporal processing are discussed.