Beyond the emotional impact of dissonance: Inharmonic music elicits greater cognitive interference than does harmonic music

dc.contributor.advisorSmilek, Daniel
dc.contributor.authorBonin, Tanor
dc.date.accessioned2016-04-29T19:15:11Z
dc.date.available2016-04-29T19:15:11Z
dc.date.issued2016-04-29
dc.date.submitted2016-04-18
dc.description.abstractThe present research evaluates whether task-irrelevant inharmonic music produces greater interference with cognitive performance than task-irrelevant harmonic music. Participants completed either an auditory (Experiments 1 and 2) or a visual (Experiment 3) version of the cognitively demanding 2-back task in which they were required to categorize each digit in a sequence of digits as either being a target (a digit also presented two positions earlier in the sequence) or a distractor (all other items). They were concurrently exposed to task-irrelevant harmonic music (judged to be consonant), task-irrelevant inharmonic music (judged to be dissonant), or no music at all as a distraction. The main finding across all three experiments was that performance on the 2-back task was worse when participants were exposed to inharmonic music than when they were exposed to harmonic music. Interestingly, performance on the 2-back task was generally the same regardless of whether harmonic music or no music was played. I suggest that inharmonic, dissonant music interferes with cognitive performance by requiring greater cognitive processing than harmonic, consonant music, and speculate about why this might be.en
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10012/10427
dc.language.isoenen
dc.pendingfalse
dc.publisherUniversity of Waterlooen
dc.subjectDissonanceen
dc.subjectInharmonicityen
dc.subjectMusicen
dc.subjectAuditory perceptionen
dc.subjectCognitive interferenceen
dc.titleBeyond the emotional impact of dissonance: Inharmonic music elicits greater cognitive interference than does harmonic musicen
dc.typeMaster Thesisen
uws-etd.degreeMaster of Artsen
uws-etd.degree.departmentPsychologyen
uws-etd.degree.disciplinePsychologyen
uws-etd.degree.grantorUniversity of Waterlooen
uws.comment.hiddenI hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. A subset of these data have previously been published in: Bonin, T., & Smilek, D. (2016). Inharmonic music elicits more negative affect and interferes more with a concurrent cognitive task than does harmonic music. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 78(3), 946–959.en
uws.contributor.advisorSmilek, Daniel
uws.contributor.affiliation1Faculty of Artsen
uws.peerReviewStatusUnrevieweden
uws.published.cityWaterlooen
uws.published.countryCanadaen
uws.published.provinceOntarioen
uws.scholarLevelGraduateen
uws.typeOfResourceTexten

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