Manda Fischer

• PhD
• Postdoctoral Associate at Western University

Timbre perception and auditory grouping principles can provide a theoretical basis for aspects of orchestration. In Experiment 1, 36 excerpts contained two streams and 12 contained one stream as determined by music analysts. Streams—the perceptual connecting of successive events—comprised either single instruments or blended combinations of instrum...

Prior knowledge and long‐term memory can guide our attention to facilitate search for and detection of subtle targets embedded in a complex scene. A number of neuropsychological and experimental studies have investigated this effect, yet results in the field remain mixed, as there is a lack of consensus regarding the neural correlates thought to su...

The current study addressed the relation between awareness, attention, and memory, by examining whether merely presenting a tone and audio-clip, without deliberately associating one with other, was sufficient to bias attention to a given side. Participants were exposed to 80 different audio-clips (half included a lateralized pure tone) and told to...

How does memory influence auditory perception, and what are the underlying mechanisms that drive these interactions? Most empirical studies on the neural correlates of memory‐guided perception have used static visual tasks, resulting in a bias in the literature that contrasts with recent research highlighting the dynamic nature of memory retrieval....

The stratification of layers of differing prominence (foreground/background) is a common technique in orchestration. Musicians heard 23 excerpts containing foreground and background layers as previously determined by music analysts. A given layer comprised either a single auditory stream of one or more blended instruments or a harmonic or rhythmic...

How does memory influence auditory perception, and what are the underlying mechanisms that drive these interactions? Most empirical investigations on the neural correlates of memory-guided perception have used static visual tasks creating a bias in the literature that contrasts with recent research highlighting the dynamic nature of memory retrieva...

When masked by competing speech, an utterance is more intelligible when it is spoken by someone familiar than a stranger (novel). If this benefit occurs because familiar voices are less cognitively demanding, then a concurrent task should disrupt perception of speech less if the carrier voice is familiar. Participants (N=30) heard two sentences spo...

The stratification of layers of differing prominence (foreground/background) is a common technique in orchestration. Musicians heard 23 excerpts containing foreground and background layers as previously determined by music analysts. A given layer comprised either a single auditory stream of one or more blended instruments or a harmonic or rhythmic...

Does memory prepare us to act? Long-term memory can facilitate signal detection, though the degree of benefit varies and can even be absent. To dissociate between learning and behavioral expression of learning, we used high-density electroencephalography to assess memory retrieval and response processing. At learning, participants heard everyday so...