Perception-action coupling in context: developmental processes / pitch structures in music cognition

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My research in perception-action coupling emphasizes how infants and children combine information arising from perceptual systems with motor action, within the larger cognitive, social, and potentially cultural contexts of development. Within this framework my research has focused on a variety of areas, including infants' abilities to recognize their own body position and the movement of their limbs in space (intermodal perception and the development of the self), how vision is employed in keeping one's balance (postural control), how it is we are able to successfully move through a cluttered world (visually-guided locomotion), and the nature of the processes employed by infants and young children in keeping a sense of where they are in the world, relative to important landmarks and environmental events. Generally, this research supports the idea that infants coordinate perceptual system information (vision and hearing) with how they're moving, and how such perceptual-motor coordination modifies, or is modified by, general cognitive and social functioning. My work in musical cognition focuses on how it is that adults are able to understand the complex pitch structures they typically encounter when listening to various forms of music. This work has typically emphasized two complementary pitch structures - the idea of musical tonality, which is the structuring of all of the possible notes one could hear around a central reference tone, and the idea of melodic contour, which involves the patterns of rises and falls in pitch that one typically hears in a melody. Both of these processes have been formally modelled, and these models are currently being extended to incorporate both rhythmic and metrical information, as well in terms of their applicability to other aspects of pitch information, such as harmonic structure. In general, this research provides insights into how it is that adults perceive, respond to, remember, and potentially perform, complex musical information.