Biomedical subjects

Matthew D Schulkind

Publications and source records attributed to Matthew D Schulkind.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Emotional organization of autobiographical memory.

The emotional organization of autobiographical memory was examined by determining whether emotional cues would influence autobiographical retrieval in younger and older adults. Unfamiliar musical cues that represented orthogonal combinations of positive and negative valence and high and low arousal were used. Whereas cue valence influenced the valence of the retrieved memories, cue arousal did not affect arousal ratings. However, high-arousal cues were associated with reduced response latencies. A significant bias to report positive memories was observed, especially for the older adults, but neither the distribution of memories across the life span nor response latencies varied across memories differing in valence or arousal. These data indicate that emotional information can serve as effective cues for autobiographical memories and that autobiographical memories are organized in terms of emotional valence but not emotional arousal. Thus, current theories of autobiographical memory must be expanded to include emotional valence as a primary dimension of organization.

Affect↗

PubMed2004

Serial processing in melody identification and the organization of musical semantic memory.

Unlike the visual stimuli used in most object identification experiments, melodies are organized temporally rather than spatially. Therefore, they may be particularly sensitive to manipulations of the order in which information is revealed. Two experiments examined whether the initial elements of a melody are differentially important for identification. Initial exposures to impoverished versions of a melody significantly decreased subsequent identification, especially when the early exposures did not include the initial notes of the melody. Analyses of the initial notes indicated that they are differentially important for melody identification because they help the listener detect the overall structure of the melody. Confusion errors tended to be songs that either were drawn from the same genre or shared similar phrasing. These data indicate that conceptual processing influences melody identification, that phrase-level information is used to organize melodies in semantic memory, and that phrase-level information is required to effectively search semantic memory.

Auditory Perception↗

PubMed2004

Conceptual and perceptual information both influence melody identification.

Three processes have been identified as central to object identification: top-down processing, bottom-up processing, and lateral competition. Six experiments using the perceptual interference paradigm were conducted to assess the relative contributions of these three processes to melody identification. Significant interference was observed only when the target and the distracting information were difficult to distinguish both perceptually and conceptually. Lateral competition-the activation of specific distractor melodies--did not influence the magnitude of interference observed. These results suggest that bottom-up and top-down processes contribute more to melody identification than does lateral competition. The data are discussed in terms of the broader literature on object identification and the relationship between identifying melodies, spoken words, and visual objects.

Fixation, Ocular↗

PubMed2002

Feature modulation search: a novel memory search model that extends the perceptual interference effect to musical stimuli.

Although most research in the perceptual interference literature has used visual stimuli, recent experiments have replicated this effect using musical stimuli. Two experiments investigated whether musical and visual demonstrations of the effect are produced by a common mechanism by examining whether the provision of incorrect cues would impair melodic object identification in the perceptual interference paradigm. Whereas incorrect cues typically do not affect visual object identification, they reduced melody identification both when the subjects generated the cues and when the experimenter provided them. A novel model (feature modulation search) is presented to account for perceptual interference in musical stimuli. The model has potential applications for the larger perceptual interference literature and for related phenomena in which target-related information impairs cognition.

Auditory Perception↗