title: Non-musicians also have a piano in the head: evidence for spatial-musical associations from line bisection tracking.
abstract: The spatial representation of ordinal sequences (numbers, time, tones) seems to be a fundamental cognitive property. While an automatic association between horizontal space and pitch height (left-low pitch, right-high pitch) is constantly reported in musicians, the evidence for such an association in non-musicians is mixed. In this study, 20 non-musicians performed a line bisection task while listening to irrelevant high- and low-pitched tones and white noise (control condition). While pitch height had no influence on the final bisection point, participants' movement trajectories showed systematic biases: When approaching the line and touching the line for the first time (initial bisection point), the mouse cursor was directed more rightward for high-pitched tones compared to low-pitched tones and noise. These results show that non-musicians also have a subtle but nevertheless automatic association between pitch height and the horizontal space. This suggests that spatial-musical associations do not necessarily depend on constant sensorimotor experiences (as it is the case for musicians) but rather reflect the seemingly inescapable tendency to represent ordinal information on a horizontal line.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bern, Fabrikstrasse 8, CH-3000, Bern, Switzerland. matthias.hartmann@psy.unibe.ch.
authors.forename: Matthias
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1132-1339
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hartmann
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D006801:Humans; D009146:Music; D010898:Pitch Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Line bisection; Mouse tracking; SMARC (spatial–musical association of response code); SNARC (spatial–numerical association of response code)