TY - JOUR PY - 2012// TI - Referential coding contributes to the horizontal SMARC effect JO - Journal of experimental psychology: human perception and performance A1 - Cho, Yang Seok A1 - Bae, Gi Yeul A1 - Proctor, Robert W. SP - 726 EP - 734 VL - 38 IS - 3 N2 - The present study tested whether coding of tone pitch relative to a referent contributes to the correspondence effect between the pitch height of an auditory stimulus and the location of a lateralized response. When left-right responses are mapped to high or low pitch tones, performance is better with the high-right/low-left mapping than with the opposite mapping, a phenomenon called the horizontal SMARC effect. However, when pitch height is task irrelevant, the horizontal SMARC effect occurs only for musicians. In Experiment 1, nonmusicians performed a pitch discrimination task, and the SMARC effect was evident regardless of whether a referent tone was presented. However, in Experiment 2, for a timbre-judgment task, nonmusicians showed a SMARC effect only when a referent tone was presented, whereas musicians showed a SMARC effect that did not interact with presence/absence of the referent. Dependence of the SMARC effect for nonmusicians on a reference tone was replicated in Experiment 3, in which judgments of the color of a visual stimulus were made in the presence of a concurrent high- or low-pitched pure tone. These results suggest that referential coding of pitch height is a key determinant for the horizontal SMARC effect when pitch height is irrelevant to the task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).

Language: en

LA - en SN - 0096-1523 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0026157 ID - ref1 ER -