An Investigation of Surface Characteristic Effects in Melody Recognition

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Hear No Evil: Can Music Attenuate the Irrelevant Speech Effect?

Abstract This study aims to replicate the irrelevant speech effect (ISE) in a local context and, more important, is the first to directly investigate if musical information can reduce impairments imposed by the ISE on a serial word recall task. Thirty-five undergraduates from the National University of Singapore performed serial recall on 10 word lists. The lists were presented under 5 auditory conditions, namely: Music-Only, Combined (music with background speech), Scrambled music with background speech, Background Speech-Only and White Noise conditions. The Scrambled condition contained the same piece of music as the Combined condition except that it was re-arranged in a random fashion; the mission of this condition was to specifically provide a comparison basis to test if "musical structure" per se actually attenuates the ISE. A significant main effect of music conditions emerged. ISE was successfully replicated, where a significantly lower percentage of correct words was recalled in the Background Speech-Only condition compared to all other conditions. ISE was also successfully attenuated, but the present data suggest that musical structure per se was not (at least not entirely) responsible for the attenuation, since the Scrambled condition had superior performance than both the Combined and Background Speech-Only conditions. Here, we propose and discuss several novel theoretical models involving changing acoustical features, selective attention, and arousal to account for the present findings

Global-local visual processing impacts risk taking behaviors, but only at first

We investigated the impact of early visual processing on decision-making during unpredictable, risky situations. Participants undertook Navon’s (1977) task and attended to either global letters or local letters only, following which they completed the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). It was observed that global-focused individuals made more balloon pumps during the BART (i.e., took more risk), whereas local-focused individuals took less risk, albeit only initially. The theory of predictive and reactive control systems (PARCS) provides an excellent account of the data. Implications and future directions are discussed

Search for heavy resonances decaying to two Higgs bosons in final states containing four b quarks

A search is presented for narrow heavy resonances X decaying into pairs of Higgs bosons (H) in proton-proton collisions collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC at root s = 8 TeV. The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb(-1). The search considers HH resonances with masses between 1 and 3 TeV, having final states of two b quark pairs. Each Higgs boson is produced with large momentum, and the hadronization products of the pair of b quarks can usually be reconstructed as single large jets. The background from multijet and t (t) over bar events is significantly reduced by applying requirements related to the flavor of the jet, its mass, and its substructure. The signal would be identified as a peak on top of the dijet invariant mass spectrum of the remaining background events. No evidence is observed for such a signal. Upper limits obtained at 95 confidence level for the product of the production cross section and branching fraction sigma(gg -> X) B(X -> HH -> b (b) over barb (b) over bar) range from 10 to 1.5 fb for the mass of X from 1.15 to 2.0 TeV, significantly extending previous searches. For a warped extra dimension theory with amass scale Lambda(R) = 1 TeV, the data exclude radion scalar masses between 1.15 and 1.55 TeV

Measurement of the top quark mass using charged particles in pp collisions at root s=8 TeV

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