Fig. 1.

Schema learning in melody segregation (paradigm 1). (A) Schematic of the trial structure (Upper) and a spectrogram of a sample stimulus (Lower). A target melody (green line segments) was presented concurrently with two distractor notes (red line segments), followed by a probe melody (green line segments). Listeners judged whether the probe melody matched the target melody in the mixture. The probe melody was transposed up or down in pitch by a random amount. (B) Schematic of the basic experiment structure. On every other trial the target melody was generated from a common schema. On schema-based trials, the melody in the mixture was drawn from the schema 50% of the time, while the probe was always drawn from the schema. (C) Results of experiment 1: recognition of melodies amid distractor tones with and without schemas (n = 160). Error bars throughout this figure denote the SEM. (D) Results of experiment 2: effect of an intervening trial block on learned schema (n = 192). Listeners were exposed to a schema, then completed a block without the schema, and then completed two additional blocks, one containing the original schema and one containing a new schema. The order of the two blocks was counterbalanced across participants. (Lower) The two rows of the schematic depict the two possible block orders. (Upper) The data plotted are from the last two blocks. (E) Results of experiment 3: effect of multiple interleaved schemas (n = 88). Results are plotted separately for the two schemas used for each participant, resulting in 25 and 50 trials per bin for the schema and non-schema conditions, respectively. (F) Spectrogram of a sample stimulus from experiment 4. Stimulus and task were analogous to those of experiment 1, except that noise bursts were used instead of tones. (G) Results of experiment 4: recognition of noise-burst sequences amid distractor bursts, with and without schemas (n = 68).