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Modeling the Relational Shift in Melodic Processing of Young Children

Modeling the Relational Shift in Melodic Processing of Young Children Ahnate Lim (ahnate@hawaii.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa 2530 Dole Street, Honolulu, HI 96822 USA Leonidas A. A. Doumas (leonidas@hawaii.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa 2530 Dole Street, Honolulu, HI 96822 USA Scott Sinnett (ssinnett@hawaii.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa 2530 Dole Street, Honolulu, HI 96822 USA Abstract As a ubiquitous trend in the cognitive development of children, the ‘relational shift’ accounts for a change in preference for absolute percepts towards a preference for relational percepts, and is observed across a wide variety of domains. Extensive evidence indicates that this prepotency for relational processing is also observed in how children process melodies. When recalling melodies, younger children typically recall more absolute pitch properties than older children, while the exact opposite occurs in older children. Using DORA (Discovery Of Relations by Analogy; Doumas et al., 2008), a domain-general symbolic-connectionist model of relation learning, we simulated the relational shift in melodic perception of children age 3-6 years based on an experiment by Sergeant and Roche (1973). DORA’s performance matched the children’s well, suggesting common developmental and perceptual mechanisms between the relational shift in melodic processing and the shift seen across other domains. Keywords: Melodic perception; relation learning; development; relational shift; absolute pitch; computational modeling; DORA. Introduction One of the fundamental cross-domain trends in human development is characterized by a qualitative transformation, or shift, in how children process information. Evidence from developmental psychology overwhelmingly indicates that while children initially attend to, recall, and reason about absolute perceptual properties, around the age of 4-6 they begin to rely on structured relational properties (Allport, 1924; Gentner & Rattermann, 1991; Halford, 2005; Pollack, 1969; Vernon, 1940). This shift has been observed in areas such as language (Gentner, 1988), spatial tasks (Case & Khanna, 1981; DeLoache, Sugarman, & Brown, 1985), number comprehension (Gelman & Gallistel, 1978; Michie, 1985), and visual shape perception (Abecassis, Sera, Yonas, & Schwade, 2001), to name but a few. This phenomenon has been termed the ‘relational shift,’ as the characteristic trend is towards greater reliance on relational attributes as children mature. Consistent with the developmental trajectory for the relational shift in other domains, in the domain of music children also develop from initially processing more absolute aspects of melodies to processing more relational aspects as they grow older. In an especially revealing study, Sergeant and Roche (1973) trained three groups of children from the age of three to six to reproduce melodies from invariant recordings. When the children were required to recall the melodies one week later, the younger group reproduced the absolute pitches more accurately than the older group, while the older group reproduced the relational aspects (melodic shape, interval sizes, and tonality) more accurately than the younger group. This perceptual shift and exchange in proficiency levels between the recall of absolute and relational musical aspects in younger and older children has been replicated in many other studies as well (Saffran, 2003; Saffran & Griepentrog, 2001; Sergeant, 1969; Sergeant & Roche, 1973; Stalinski & Schellenberg, 2010; Takeuchi & Hulse, 1993). Given the prevalence of the relational shift across multiple domains, it is reasonable to assert that any comprehensive theory or model of cognitive development must necessarily account for this phenomenon. One of the models of higher cognition that has successfully been used to account for the relational shift in development is DORA (Discovery Of Relations by Analogy; Doumas, Hummel, & Sandhofer, 2008). DORA has been used to simulate the relational shift in visual shape perception (Doumas & Hummel, 2010), analogical problems (Doumas, Morrison, & Richland, 2009; Morrison, Doumas, & Richland, 2011), categorical reasoning, spatial reasoning, general relational reasoning, and progressive alignment (Doumas et al., 2008). In this study, we aim to understand how the relational shift in melodic processing occurs in children. We hypothesize that the same processes that cause the relational shift in other domains are also responsible for the shift in the domain of melodic processing. Specifically, we propose that as children learn about the world, they increasing rely on relational invariants in the environment. This reliance is itself a direct result of the cognitive processes that allow for relational invariants to be detected in the first place. That is, equipped with a cognitive architecture that allows for intersection discovery of shared properties, the natural trend over time (i.e., repeated exposure) is to preferentially