Nicole Arco, an adjunct professor of Psychology at Mount Saint Mary College, will continue this semester's Investigating Research on Campus (iROC) series with "Music Expertise and Impact on Eye Movements," on Thursday, March 3 at 12:45 p.m.
The talk will take place in person and virtually via Zoom at the college. It's free and open to the public.
The talk will be held on campus a 330 Powell Ave., Newburgh, N.Y. in the Dominican Center, room 218. Visitors must wear a mask and may be asked to complete a short COVID symptom questionnaire before coming on campus. Please do not come to campus if you are feeling ill.
You must register to attend the virtual presentation. Register at www.msmc.edu/ArcoiROC
According to some theories of expertise, experts learn how to group together individual features into larger meaningful patterns called "chunks." In this talk, Arco will discuss how she tested if expert musicians use chunks to process music scores by reanalyzing an eye tracking dataset from a music expertise study by Maturi & Sheridan from 2020. In this study, 30 experts and 30 non-musicians completed a music-related visual search task while their eye movements were monitored.
The experts showed higher accuracy and they also spent more time fixating on relevant regions, compared to the non-musicians. Specifically, they had a higher proportion of fixations and longer fixation durations than novices for the two outer quartiles, but not for the two middle quartiles. One possible explanation for why experts fixate closer to the edge of a bar of music is that they are using parafoveal processing to encode larger patterns (or chunks) that extend across multiple bars.
These findings "suggest that there are qualitative differences in how experts and non-musicians allocate their attention while processing music scores, which is consistent with the assumptions of chunking and template theories," Arco explained.
Acro graduated from Mount Saint Mary College in 2016 with a bachelor's degree in Psychology and later earned Masters in Psychology from SUNY New Paltz. She is currently working towards a PhD from SUNY Albany in Cognitive Psychology, as a member of the Visual Cognition Lab.
The goal of the college's iROC is to provide a forum for Mount faculty, staff, and students to showcase their research endeavors with the college and local communities. Presentations include research proposals, initial data collection, and completed research projects.
Mount Saint Mary College, ranked a Top-Tier University by U.S. News & World Report, offers bachelor's and master's degree programs for careers in healthcare, business, education, social services, communications, media, and the liberal arts.