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

我在知觉-动作耦合方面的研究强调婴儿和儿童如何在更大的认知、社会和潜在的文化背景下，将来自知觉系统的信息与运动动作结合起来。在这个框架内，我的研究集中在多个领域，包括婴儿识别自己身体位置和肢体在空间中运动的能力(模式间感知和自我发展)，视觉如何用于保持人的平衡(姿势控制)，我们如何能够成功地在混乱的世界中行走(视觉引导的运动)，以及婴幼儿在保持对自己所在世界位置的感觉方面所采用的过程的性质，相对于重要的地标和环境事件。总的来说，这项研究支持婴儿协调知觉系统信息(视觉和听力)与他们如何移动，以及这种知觉-运动协调如何修改或被一般认知和社会功能修改的想法。我在音乐认知方面的工作重点是成年人如何能够理解他们在听各种形式的音乐时通常会遇到的复杂的音调结构。这项工作通常强调两种互补的音高结构--音乐调性的概念，这是人们可以在中心参考音周围听到的所有可能的音符的结构，以及旋律轮廓的概念，它涉及人们通常在旋律中听到的音高上升和下降的模式。这两个过程都已被正式建模，这些模型目前正在扩展，以纳入节奏和韵律信息，以及它们对音调信息的其他方面的适用性，如和声结构。总体而言，这项研究为成年人如何感知、回应、记忆和潜在地执行复杂的音乐信息提供了洞察力。

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.