Lantz_Cui_Cuddy_2019

To survive, organisms need to organize perceptual input into coherent, usable structures. Research has illuminated the potential role of frequency of occurrence and duration as cues to extract statistical regularities from our environment. Musical stimuli provide a unique opportunity to study how these cues are used to organize auditory input into higher level perceptual entities, i.e., pitch structure, and to assess the influence of cognitive schema. To examine the relative importance of these two cues in pitch structure perception, we constructed novel tone sequences in which frequency of occurrence and duration cues were pitted against each other. We assessed perceived pitch structure in musically trained and untrained listeners using a probe tone paradigm. This dataset contains the raw data from three experiments in which the stimuli were also manipulated so as to assess the influence also of previous schematic knowledge.