The Impact of Transposition Skills on Inhibitory Control Performance

This study tests whether existing transposition skills have an impact upon inhibitory control. Differences in the degree of transposition practice could translate in different cognitive functionality of musicians and reveal further unexplored evidence of inhibitory control’s plasticity. A total of 64 participants were divided into a group of musicians (n = 34) and a group of non-musicians (n = 30). A transposition task, a music Stroop task and a classic Stroop task were designed. Musicians played their main instruments to play-as-written or transposed conditions from which transposition levels were calculated. All participants responded to the music and the classic Stroop task. The former required participants to choose the note written name while ignoring its location on the staff. Notation system, note-naming system and familiarity with a specific clef was ensured for every music participant. The latter consisted on a motor adaptation of the classic Stroop task where the written word had to be ignored and instead of that pick the perceived colour. Accuracy, reaction time and a composite score was calculated for both tasks. Stroop tasks succeeded in eliciting an inhibitory control response. However no inhibitory control performance differences according to the transposition skill level were detected

Investigating interpersonal accuracy in design and music performance - Contextual influences in mutual understanding

We constantly attempt to know what someone else may be thinking or feeling, what kind of personality they have, what their believes are, etc. Despite how common this "mind reading" process is to us we are surprisingly inaccurate when inferring someone else's mental states. The correct understanding of others' mental states – interpersonal accuracy – is key for successful social interactions and its scientific study demands a complex balance between controlled experimental and naturalistic conditions. Design and music performance are two contexts yet unexplored through the lenses of interpersonal accuracy. In design, being interpersonally accurate towards users is deemed important for design outcomes. User-understanding is broadly referred to as empathy in design. Yet, empathy is not clearly defined. We expose this problem and suggest some conceptual clarity. In music performance, interpersonal accuracy allows us to better understand the complex communication between musician-listener. A musician experiences emotions while performing, but it is not known whether listeners can detect these accurately. We adapt two interpersonal accuracy methodologies, empathic accuracy, and emotional recognition accuracy. Empathic accuracy allows measuring the similarity between remembered and inferred mental contents of interacting dyads. Emotional recognition accuracy allows to measure the accurate judgment of someone's non-verbal emotional expressions. Through adapting empathic accuracy in design cases, it was observed that designers obtained approximately 50% accuracy, and showed higher accuracy when inferring design-related mental contents than mental contents irrelevant to design. In comparison to previous empathic accuracy literature, designers obtained higher empathic accuracy scores. We attribute these to contextual cues such as awareness of the conversation topic, and the demonstration of concrete objects. Although the causal link between designers' empathic accuracy and design outcomes remains unestablished. Through adapting emotional recognition accuracy into music performance, it was observed that listeners perceived lower anxiety than that reported by the musician across experimental conditions. Furthermore, the listener's emotional recognition accuracy is a complex skill affected by variables such as multimodal perception, and the listener's musical background. Altogether, inaccuracy was observed across the context of design and music. Interpersonal accuracy can also be affected by multimodal perception and the perceiver's background. We conclude suggesting some ideas to improve interpersonal accuracy

When nerves hit: The effect of trait anxiety, situational stress, and task mastery on the perception and interpersonal accuracy of musical expressiveness

Publisher Copyright: Copyright © 2023 Chang-Arana, Mavrolampados, Pokki and Thompson.Music performance anxiety (MPA) is a prevalent phenomenon with potentially serious consequences to a musician’s wellbeing and professional career. Yet, MPA does not always affect performance quality. It is hypothesized that trait anxiety, situational stress, and task mastery can exacerbate the effects of MPA and affect performance quality. Furthermore, it is unclear whether these effects are noticeable to both listeners and performing musicians. We measure performance quality as the expressiveness scores assigned by musicians and listeners to a set of pre-recorded performances. We selected three pianists with low, mid, and high MPA. Each pianist performed two pieces of their choice, familiar and unfamiliar, which were performed in rehearsal and recital conditions. The performances were videoed and edited into shorter clips for being presented to the performing pianists and to a set of online raters. Listeners and pianists will be asked to rate the expressiveness of all clips. We will determine the difference between the listeners’ perceived expressiveness and the pianists’ own expressiveness scores to estimate how well did listeners understand the pianists’ expressive intentions. We investigate (1) what is the effect of trait anxiety, situational stress, and task mastery on the listener’s perception of expressiveness and (2) what is the effect of these same variables on the listeners’ understanding of expressiveness.Peer reviewe

When nerves hit : The effect of trait anxiety, situational stress, and task mastery on the perception and interpersonal accuracy of musical expressiveness

Music performance anxiety (MPA) is a prevalent phenomenon with potentially serious consequences to a musician’s wellbeing and professional career. Yet, MPA does not always affect performance quality. It is hypothesized that trait anxiety, situational stress, and task mastery can exacerbate the effects of MPA and affect performance quality. Furthermore, it is unclear whether these effects are noticeable to both listeners and performing musicians. We measure performance quality as the expressiveness scores assigned by musicians and listeners to a set of pre-recorded performances. We selected three pianists with low, mid, and high MPA. Each pianist performed two pieces of their choice, familiar and unfamiliar, which were performed in rehearsal and recital conditions. The performances were videoed and edited into shorter clips for being presented to the performing pianists and to a set of online raters. Listeners and pianists will be asked to rate the expressiveness of all clips. We will determine the difference between the listeners’ perceived expressiveness and the pianists’ own expressiveness scores to estimate how well did listeners understand the pianists’ expressive intentions. We investigate (1) what is the effect of trait anxiety, situational stress, and task mastery on the listener’s perception of expressiveness and (2) what is the effect of these same variables on the listeners’ understanding of expressiveness.peerReviewe

Understanding customers across national cultures

Funding Information: This work is supported by CSC (Chinese Scholarship Council), the ‘Future Makers’ grant of the Technology Industries of Finland Centennial Foundation and Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation. We also wish to thank Professor Kari Tammi, Xiaoqi Feng, and all the participants for their help. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.For engineering design to be successful, it is essential to understand customer experience and identify customer needs. However, it is challenging to understand customers, especially those from different national cultures. The empathy literature suggests that having similar experiences to another person can help understand them better. This study adopts an empathy measure from psychology for use in a project where designers attempt to understand customers’ driving experiences in different countries and identify their needs for detecting road hazards. We quantify designers’ empathic accuracy and the correctness of their rating of customers’ emotional tone. The results show that national cultural differences significantly affect the accuracy of designers’ empathic understanding but do not impact their understanding of customers’ emotional tone.Peer reviewe

Exploring the Interpersonal Level of Music Performance Anxiety : Online Listener’s Accuracy in Detecting Performer Anxiety

Music performance anxiety (MPA) affects musicians at various stages of a performance, from its preparation until the aftermath of its delivery. Given the commonality and potentially grave consequences of MPA, it is understandable that much attention has been paid to the musician experiencing it. Consequently, we have learned a great deal about the intrapersonal level of MPA: how to measure it, treatments, experimental manipulations, and subjective experiences. However, MPA may also manifest at an interpersonal level by influencing how the performance is perceived. Yet, this has not yet been measured. This exploratory online study focuses on the listener’s perception of anxiety and compares it to the musician’s actual experienced anxiety. Forty-eight participants rated the amount of perceived anxiety of a pianist performing two pieces of contrasting difficulty in online-recital and practice conditions. Participants were presented with two stimulus modality conditions of the performance: audiovisual and audio-only. The listener’s perception of anxiety and its similarity to the musician’s experienced anxiety varies depending on variables such as the piece performed, the stimulus modality, as well as interactions between these variables and the listener’s musical background. We discuss the implications for performance and future research on the interpersonal level of MPA.peerReviewe

Reading the User’s Mind: Designers Show High Accuracy in Inferring Design-Related Thoughts and Feelings

© 2020 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). All rights reserved. The success of design needfinding is largely dependent on how well designers understand their users. It is further claimed that user understanding and designers' capacity to adopt users' perspective, i.e. designers' ability to understand others, are key skills that should lead to successful design outcomes. The general ability to understand someone else's mental contents, such as what they else think, feel, wish, and believe, is called theory of mind. In this study, we connect concepts of humancentered design and theory of mind through empathic accuracy, a performance-based method for measuring empathy. We state two hypotheses. First, that designers are equally accurate at inferring thoughts as they are at inferring feelings. Second, that designers are more accurate in inferring design-related mental contents than those that are not related to design. We answer these hypotheses by analyzing results of altogether 24 designers watching recorded needfinding interviews of 6 users and inferring their mental contents. We observed that feelings were more accurately inferred than thoughts, although the data showed some inconsistencies. A stronger case can be made for designers' accuracy of design-related entries, where designers were consistently more accurate at inferring design-related entries than non-design-related ones. These results provide concrete insight into how designers understand users and how empathy could be quantified in the design context