Mark A Schmuckler

Mark A Schmuckler
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Mark verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
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Mark verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
University of Toronto | U of T · Department of Psychology

PhD

About

111
Publications
43,023
Reads
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3,694
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 2021 - June 2021
University of Toronto
Position
  • Vice Provost Academic Programs and Vice Provost Innovations in Undergraduate Education
July 2022 - June 2023
University of Toronto
Position
  • Acting Chair
July 2020 - December 2020
University of Toronto
Position
  • Provostial Advisor
Education
May 1983 - January 1988
Cornell University
Field of study
  • Psychology
September 1979 - April 1983
State University of New York at Binghamton
Field of study
  • Psychology, Music

Publications

Publications (111)
Poster
A meta-analysis was conducted in order to delineate whether musicians and non-musicians differ on specific cognitive and music processing domains, and determine the magnitude of any differences. Moreover, potential covariates outlined by the literature were included as moderator variables. As predicted, musicians significantly differed from non-mus...
Article
Full-text available
Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried...
Article
Full-text available
Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried...
Article
Full-text available
BACKGROUND: This study examined the weighting of multisensory and anthropometric factors in driving children’s and adult’s postural control. METHOD: A data set was created by aggregating individual participants’ postural stability measures from four target studies, employing participants ranging in age from 3 to 11 years, along with young adults. U...
Article
Researchers must infer “what babies know” based on what babies do. Thus, to maximize information from doing, researchers should use tasks and tools that capture the richness of infants' behaviors. We clarify Gibson's views about the richness of infants' behavior and their exploration in the service of guiding action – what Gibson called “learning a...
Article
Children's ability to maintain balance requires effective integration of multisensory and biomechanical information. The current project examined the interaction between such sensory inputs, manipulating visual input (presence vs. absence), haptic (somatosensory) input (presence vs. absence of contact with a stable or unstable finger support surfac...
Article
This study investigated the impact of perceptual-motor context on a classic paradigm used to assess cognitive-spatial reasoning. Specifically, this project explored the effect on search behavior of reaching around a barrier versus not reaching around a barrier during the A portion in the B phase of the well-known A-not-B task. In examining 8- and 1...
Chapter
In this chapter, the status of work on tonality and key-finding is reviewed, with an emphasis on the nature of models of tonality and of key-finding. This work highlights different general approaches to these topics (e.g., distribution and structural-functional models), the relation between these approaches themselves (e.g., oppositional versus com...
Article
Full-text available
Research on the multisensory control of locomotion has demonstrated that adults exhibit auditory-motor entrainment across an array of contexts. In such work adults will consciously modulate the cadence of their walking when instructed to match their footfalls to an auditory metronome equal to, slower than, or faster than, their natural walking cade...
Article
Listeners’ use of contour information as a basis for memory of rhythmic patterns was explored in two experiments. Both studies employed a short-term memory paradigm in which listeners heard a standard rhythm, followed by a comparison rhythm, and judged whether the comparison was the same as the standard. Comparison rhythms included exact repetition...
Article
Full-text available
Multitasking is a critical feature of our daily lives. Using a dual-task paradigm, this experiment explored adults’ abilities to simultaneously engage in everyday motor and cognitive activities, counting while walking, under conditions varying the difficulty of each of these tasks. Motor difficulty was manipulated by having participants walk forwar...
Article
Full-text available
By early childhood, children possess clear expectations about how resources should be, and typically are, distributed, expecting and advocating for equal resource distributions to recipients. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that children may be able to use deviations from equality in resource distributions to make inferences about the nature of...
Article
Extraction of meaningful information from multiple talkers relies on perceptual segregation. The temporal synchrony statistics inherent in everyday audiovisual (AV) speech offer a powerful basis for perceptual segregation. We investigated the developmental emergence of synchrony-based perceptual segregation of multiple talkers in 3–7-year-old child...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigated the relation between sports participation, body size, and postural control in children between 3 and 11 years of age. To explore this question, children's body sway was measured across multisensory conditions manipulating visual input (the presence versus absence of visual information) and proprioceptive input (varying stanc...
Preprint
The drive to move to music is evident across a variety of contexts, from the simple urge to tap our toe to a song on the radio, to massive crowds dancing in time at a rock concert. Though seemingly effortless, beat synchronization is difficult to master and children are often poor beat synchronizers. Nevertheless, auditory-motor integration is fund...
Article
The drive to move to music is evident across a variety of contexts, from the simple urge to tap our toe to a song on the radio, to massive crowds dancing in time at a rock concert. Though seemingly effortless, beat synchronization is difficult to master and children are often poor beat synchronizers. Nevertheless, auditory‐motor integration is fund...
Article
Although typically thought of as a unimodal phenomenon, musical experience is fundamentally multisensory. The current study examined such multisensory influences by exploring the impact of visual information on the processing of higher-order musical structure, within the context of harmonic expectancy formation. Specifically, musically trained part...
Article
Maintaining balance is fundamentally a multisensory process, with visual, haptic, and proprioceptive information all playing an important role in postural control. The current project examined the interaction between such sensory inputs, manipulating visual (presence versus absence), haptic (presence versus absence of contact with a stable or unsta...
Article
Social interactions often involve a cluttered multisensory scene consisting of multiple talking faces. We investigated whether audiovisual temporal synchrony can facilitate perceptual segregation of talking faces. Participants either saw four identical or four different talking faces producing temporally jittered versions of the same visible speech...
Article
Full-text available
Two experiments investigated the impact of two structural factors—musical tonality and musical texture—on pianists’ ability to play by sight without prior preparation, known as musical sight-reading. Tonality refers to the cognitive organization of tones around a central reference pitch, whereas texture refers to the organization of music in terms...
Preprint
Research on tonal priming has consistently shown that tonally expected events are processed more efficiently and has confirmed that the locus of the effect is cognitive rather than sensory. However, it is also important to investigate the role of pitch height, because models of tonal priming collapse across octaves, yet it is possible that pitch he...
Article
Control of stimulus confounds is an ever-present, and ever-important, aspect of experimental design. Typically, researchers concern themselves with such control on a local level, ensuring that individual stimuli contain only the properties they intend for them to represent. Significantly less attention, however, is paid to stimulus properties in th...
Preprint
Although the relation between tonality and musical memory has been fairly well-studied, less is known regarding the contribution of tonal-schematic expectancies to this relation. Three experiments investigated the influence of tonal expectancies on memory for single tones in a tonal melodic context. In the first experiment, listener responses indic...
Preprint
One facet of tonality perception that has been fairly understudied in the years since Krumhansl and colleagues’ groundbreaking work on tonality (Krumhansl & Kessler, 1982; Krumhansl & Shepard, 1979) is the music theoretical notion that the minor scale can have one of three distinct forms: natural, harmonic, or melodic. The experiment reported here...
Article
In typical Western music, important pitches occur disproportionately often on important beats, referred to as the tonal-metric hierarchy (Prince & Schmuckler, 2014, Music Perception, 31, 254–270). We tested whether listeners are sensitive to this alignment of pitch and temporal structure. In Experiment 1, the stimuli were 200 artificial melodies wi...
Preprint
Two experiments investigated psychological representations of musical tonality in auditory imagery. In Experiment 1, musically trained participants heard a single tone as a perceptual cue and built an auditory image of a specified major tonality based on that cue; participants’ images were then assessed using judgments of probe tones. In Experiment...
Poster
This experiment examined the impact of various dual-task manipulations (involving motor and cognitive tasks) on motor behaviour. Motor difficulty was manipulated by having adults (N = 22) walk in forward or backward directions (easy versus hard motor tasks, respectively). Cognitive difficulty was manipulated by having participants count while walki...
Article
Background Previous work on balance control in children and adults highlights the importance of multisensory information. Work in this vein has examined two principal input sources – the role of visual and haptic information on balance. Recent work has explored the impact of a different form of haptic input – object holding – on balance in young in...
Poster
Full-text available
Previous studies have found that motor and cognitive developments are closely intertwined (Diamond, 2000; Piek, Dawson, Smith & Gasson, 2008). Many studies have focused on the relationship between cognitive abilities and gross motor skills, fine motor skills, bilateral body coordination, timed performance in movements, object control or total motor...
Poster
Multisensory inputs are essential for maintaining balance, yet how the integration of such sensory information occurs across development remains an unanswered question. Moreover, the majority of work that has been conducted on this topic has looked principally at visual and haptic information; other potential sources of information, such as proprio...
Article
Recursive, hierarchically organized serial patterns provide the underlying structure in many cognitive and motor domains including speech, language, music, social interaction, and motor action. We investigated whether learning of hierarchical patterns emerges in infancy by habituating 204 infants to different hierarchical serial patterns and then t...
Article
Three studies examined young infants’ ability to distinguish between expected and unexpected motion of objects based on their shape. Using a preferential-looking paradigm, 8- and 12-month-old infants’ looking time towards expected and unexpected motion displays of familiar, everyday objects (e.g., balls and cubes) was examined. Experiment 1 demonst...
Article
Full-text available
Two experiments examined 24- and 30-month-olds' use of different forms of landmark information in an object-displacement task involving a car rolling down a ramp whose trajectory was occluded by a screen containing doors. A pompom attached to the car, visible through a transparent window running across the screen, served as a cue for the car's loca...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Prospection is the ability to plan ahead by creating a series of intentions and sequential steps to achieve a particular goal. The current study examined whether prospection was compromised in patients who had sustained a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and who claimed to be disabled because of their chronic cognitive impairment, as...
Chapter
Full-text available
Melody is the most ubiquitous form of musical structure with which listeners come into contact on a daily basis. Mirroring the prevalence and importance of melody, research in music cognition has focused extensively on the processes involved in perceiving and remembering melodic structure. Despite these years of study, however, our understanding of...
Article
Full-text available
Research on tonal priming has consistently shown that tonally expected events are processed more efficiently and has confirmed that the locus of the effect is cognitive rather than sensory. However, it is also important to investigate the role of pitch height, because models of tonal priming collapse across octaves, yet it is possible that pitch he...
Article
Full-text available
Although the relation between tonality and musical memory has been fairly well-studied, less is known regarding the contribution of tonal-schematic expectancies to this relation. Three experiments investigated the influence of tonal expectancies on memory for single tones in a tonal melodic context. In the first experiment, listener responses indic...
Article
Full-text available
Expectancy has long been of interest to psychologists and recently has become the focus of research in musical cognition. Four experiments are reported that investigated the formation of expectancies in musically trained listeners and performers. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the factors underlying the formation of melodic and harmonic expectancies,...
Article
Full-text available
Despite the plethora of research on the role of tonality and meter in music perception, there is little work on how these fundamental properties function together. The most basic question is whether the two hierarchical structures are correlated - that is, do metrically stable positions in the measure preferentially feature tonally stable pitches,...
Article
The current study examined whether carrying objects in one's hands influenced different parameters associated with independent locomotion. Specifically, 14- and 24-month-olds walked in a straight path under four conditions of object carriage - no object (control), one object carried in one hand (one object-one hand), two objects carried in each of...
Article
Full-text available
Children's ability to flexibly shift attention between different representational schemes was investigated using the dimensional change card sorting task. Across three experiments (N = 56 three-year-olds and N = 40 four-year-olds in ; N = 14 three-year-olds in ; and N = 14 three-year-olds in ) the role of perceptual information on children's cognit...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter focuses on the relation between perceptual/cognitive systems and motor/action processes. Beginning with a brief review of this concept, different characterizations of the idea of perceptual and motor relations are traced, using the history of motor development research as a framework. Following a discussion of more recent conceptualiza...
Article
Full-text available
The phenomenon of response perseveration has captivated psychologists for years, with the majority of theories of this effect focusing primarily on the cognitive, spatially oriented nature of this behavior. The current project examined whether response perseveration would also occur within a task requiring little cognitive spatial resources-barrier...
Article
Full-text available
One facet of tonality perception that has been fairly understudied in the years since Krumhansl and colleagues’ groundbreaking work on tonality (Krumhansl & Kessler, 1982; Krumhansl & Shepard, 1979) is the music theoretical notion that the minor scale can have one of three distinct forms: natural, harmonic, or melodic. The experiment reported here...
Article
Full-text available
Melodic contour, or the pattern of rises and falls in pitch, is a critical component of melodic structure, and has an important impact on listeners' perceptions of, and memory for, music. Despite its centrality, few formal models of contour structure exist. One recent exception involves characterizing contour by the relative degrees of strength of...
Article
Full-text available
Two experiments investigated psychological representations of musical tonality in auditory imagery. In Experiment 1, musically trained participants heard a single tone as a perceptual cue and built an auditory image of a specified major tonality based on that cue; participants' images were then assessed using judgments of probe tones. In Experiment...
Article
Full-text available
Two experiments investigated 9-month-old infants’ abilities to recognize the correspondence between an actual three-dimensional (3D) object and its two-dimensional (2D) representation, looking specifically at representations that did not literally depict the actual object: schematic line drawings. In Experiment 1, infants habituated to a line drawi...
Article
Full-text available
The authors examined how the structural attributes of tonality and meter influence musical pitch-time relations. Listeners heard a musical context followed by probe events that varied in pitch class and temporal position. Tonal and metric hierarchies contributed additively to the goodness-of-fit of probes, with pitch class exerting a stronger influ...
Article
Full-text available
Musical pitch-time relations were explored by investigating the effect of temporal variation on pitch perception. In Experiment 1, trained musicians heard a standard tone followed by a tonal context and then a comparison tone. They then performed one of two tasks. In the cognitive task, they indicated whether the comparison tone was in the key of t...
Article
Full-text available
Cross-modal melodic contour perception was examined in two experiments by having participants rate the similarity of contours presented as auditory (melodies) and visual (line drawings) stimuli. Long melodies were assessed in Experiment 1 (M = 35 notes); shorter melodies were assessed in Experiment 2 (M = 17 notes). Ratings for matched auditory and...
Article
Full-text available
Listeners without absolute (or "perfect") pitch have difficulty identifying or producing isolated musical pitches from memory. Instead, they process the relative pattern of pitches, which remains invariant across pitch transposition. Musically untrained non-absolute pitch possessors demonstrated absolute pitch memory for the telephone dial tone, a...
Article
Full-text available
Melody is the most ubiquitous form of musical structure, with which listeners come into contact on a daily basis. Mirroring the prevalence and importance of melody, research in music cognition has focused extensively on the processes involved in perceiving and remembering melodic structure. Despite these years of study, however, our understanding o...
Article
Full-text available
This experiment investigated the impact of the path of approach of an object, from head on versus from the side, and the type of imminent contact with that object, a hit versus a miss, on young infants' perceptions of object looming. Consistent with earlier studies, we found that 4- to 5-month-old infants do indeed discriminate hits versus misses....
Article
Full-text available
This study examined 6-month-old infants' abilities to use the visual information pro- vided by simulated self-movement through the world, and movement of an object through the world, for spatial orientation. Infants were habituated to a visual display in which they saw a toy hidden, followed by either rotation of the point of observation through th...
Article
Full-text available
Two experiments explored 5-month-old infants' recognition of self-movement in the context of imperfect contingencies between felt and seen movement. Previous work has shown that infants can discriminate a display of another child's movements from an on-line video display of their own movements, even when featural information is removed. These earli...
Article
Full-text available
Perceiving the tonality of a musical passage is a fundamental aspect of the experience of hearing music. Models for determining tonality have thus occupied a central place in music cognition research. Three experiments investigated 1 well-known model of tonal determination: the Krumhansl-Schmuckler key-finding algorithm. In Experiment 1, listeners'...
Article
Full-text available
The role of 2 psychological processes, differentiation and organization, were examined in the perception of musical tonality. Differentiation distinguishes elements from one another and was varied in terms of the distribution of pitch durations within tone sequences. Organization establishes relations between differentiated elements and was varied...
Chapter
Full-text available
Article
Full-text available
The A-not-B error (Piaget, 1954), which occurs when infants search perseveratively on reversal trials in a delayed-response task, is one of the most widely studied phenomena in developmental psychology. Nonetheless, the effect of A-trial experience on the probability and magnitude of this error remains unclear. In this study, 9-month-old infants we...
Article
Full-text available
Ecological validity has typically been taken to refer to whether or not one can generalize from observed behavior in the laboratory to natural behavior in the world. Although common in current discussions of research, the idea of ecological validity has a long history in psychological thought. A brief historical examination of this idea reveals tha...
Article
Full-text available
Three experiments investigated the use of visual input and body movement input arising from movement through the world on spatial orientation. Infants between 9 1/2 and 18 months participated in a search task in which they searched for a toy hidden in 1 of 2 containers. Prior to beginning search, either the infants or the containers were rotated 18...
Article
The aim of this study was to examine the roles of body size parameters, walking skill, and locomotor experience in determining the abilities of 14-, 18-, 24-, and 30-month-old toddlers to cross a barrier varying in height. Thresholds for barrier crossing were measured using a modified psychophysical staircase procedure, walking skill was assessed u...
Article
Full-text available
In two experiments, descriptions of melodic contour structure and predictions of perceived similarity relations between pairs of contours produced by a number of different models are examined. Two of these models, based on the music- theoretic approaches of Friedmann (1985) and Marvin and Laprade (1987), characterize contours in terms of interval c...
Article
Full-text available
La génération d’attentes a été reconnue comme un facteur central dans les perceptions de ceux qui écoutent la musique et les analyses psychologiques et théoriques sur la musique continuent de lui accorder une grande importance. Étant donné cet intérêt, il n’est pas étonnant que l’on ait constaté que les attentes jouent un rôle essentiel dans les ju...
Article
Full-text available
Introduces this issue of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology as focusing on musical cognition and performance. There are a series of articles reporting on explorations of various aspects of the cognitive processing of music. Other articles focus on different aspects of the perceptual and cognitive processing of music. Also represented...
Article
Full-text available
Here the issue of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology devotes its knowledge to the execution of music. The interest and research on the knowledge and execution of music have increased considerably during the last decades. This field now has become one of the most dynamic sub-disciplines of psychology and musical thinking. To present su...
Article
Full-text available
L'aptitude des adultes à coordonner les mouvements de la main et des doigts lors d'exercices manuels spécialisés est fascinante, particulièrement dans les deux exemples évidents de la dactylographie et du jeu de piano. Dans ces deux domaines, l'analyse du temps d'exécution et des erreurs commises nous ouvre une fenêtre sur les processus cognitifs e...
Article
Full-text available
One critical step in the processing of complex auditory information (i.e., language and music) involves organizing such information into hierarchical units, such as phrases. In this study, musically trained and untrained listeners' recognition memory for short, naturalistic melodies varying in their phrase structure was tested. For musically traine...
Article
Full-text available
In the McGurk effect, perceptual identification of auditory speech syllables is influenced by simultaneous presentation of discrepant visible speech syllables. This effect has been found in subjects of different ages and with various native language backgrounds. But no McGurk tests have been conducted with prelinguistic infants. In the present seri...
Article
Full-text available
Two experiments examined postural responses of 3- to 6-year-old children to visual information for oscillation. In Experiment 1, children saw oscillations of the surround, with these movements ranging in frequency between 0.2 and 0.8 Hz. Analyses of anterior-posterior postural sway revealed that, similar to previous developmental investigations, th...
Article
Full-text available
Jeannerod (1994) advocates studying motor images to understand the representation of action. We identify an unsettled issue that complicates the use of motor images to study the representation of action and present some evidence for a clear absence of equivalence between motor imagery and movement preparation. We then elaborate and emphasize the re...
Article
Full-text available
The impact of manipulating the physical layout and the perceptual appearance of the environment on motor behavior and perceptual judgments for action was investigated by presenting 12- to 30 month old toddlers with a visually guided locomotion task involving stepping over a barrier varying in its height. Experiment 1 observed changes in infants' cr...
Article
Full-text available
Three experiments explored 5- and 7-month-old infants' intermodal coordination of proprioceptive information produced by leg movements, and visual movement information specifying these same motions. The visual information took the form of point light information for leg and feet movements, with visual displays presented in upright, ego-centered on-...
Article
Full-text available
Successful navigation in the world requires differentiating an obstacle in one's path from an aperture through which one could pass. An approaching obstacle is specified by texture expansion within the obstacle's contour and the deletion of background texture outside the object. In contrast, an approaching aperture contains texture expansion within...
Article
Three experiments investigated visual-proprioceptive intermodal perception in infancy. In these studies, 5-month-old infants manually explored a hidden object while simultaneously viewing an on-line image of their own hidden limb (the contingent display) and a prerecorded videotape of a different infant's limb exploring that same object (the noncon...
Article
Full-text available
In the McGurk effect, perceptual identification of auditory speech syllables is influenced by simultaneous presentation of discrepant visible speech syllables. This effect has been found in subjects of different ages and with various native language backgrounds. But no McGurk tests have been conducted with prelinguistic infants. In the present seri...
Chapter
Full-text available
There has been a recurrent fascination in psychology with describing and understanding the growth of self-knowledge in children. In general, this interest in the self has been widespread, covering a diverse array of ideas. For example, in her review of developmental perspectives on the self, Hatter (1983) provides a partial list of the aspects of t...
Article
Full-text available
The effects of harmony and rhythm on expectancy formation were studied in two experiments. In both studies, we generated musical passages consisting of a melodic line accompanied by four harmonic (chord) events. These sequences varied in their harmonic content, the rhythmic periodicity of the three context chords prior to the final chord, and the e...
Article
Full-text available
The effects of harmony and rhythm on expectancy formation were studied in two experiments. In both studies, we generated musical passages consisting of a melodic line accompanied by four harmonic (chord) events. These sequences varied in their harmonic content, the rhythmic periodicity of the three context chords prior to the final chord, and the e...
Article
Full-text available
Studies examined infants' perceptions of 3-dimensional form, using a kinetic depth effect (KDE) display and displays containing subsets of the motion present in the KDE display. One subset consisted of "between-contour" motion, and the second consisted of "within-contour" motion. Research with adults has suggested that only between-contour motion l...
Chapter
Full-text available
There has been a dramatic change in our conceptualization of infants' perceptual and motor development in recent years. Rather than considering these different systems as independent entities, each with its own separate developmental trajectory, researchers have begun to entertain the idea that perceptual and motor systems develop interdependently,...
Article
Full-text available
The observation that natural curves and surfaces are often fractal suggests that people may be sensitive to their statistical properties. The perceptual protocols that underlie discrimination between fractals and between other types of random contour and fractals are examined. Discrimination algorithms that have precisely the same sensitivities as...
Article
Full-text available
The observation that natural curves and surfaces are often fractal suggests that people may be sensitive to their statistical properties. The perceptual protocols that underlie discrimination between fractals and between other types of random contour and fractals are examined. Discrimination algorithms that have precisely the same sensitivities as...
Article
Full-text available
A series of experiments examined auditory contour formation, investigating listeners' sensitivities to a family of random fractals known as fractional Brownian noises. Experiments 1A and 1B looked at identification of contours when 3 different noises were portrayed using variations in the pitch, duration, or loudness of successive notes of a sequen...