Comparing Musicians and Non-musicians’ Expectations in Music and Vision

The role of expectation in music has been of research interest for decades. Expectation mechanisms have also received considerable attention in vision, due in part to the widespread interest in predictive coding. Past research has uncovered different types of expectations that may be formed when exposed to a sequential stimulus, such as schematic expectation (based on general knowledge) and dynamic expectation (based on properties within the current stimulus). Yet to our knowledge, a direct comparison of the relative contribution of these types of expectation has not been performed within the same subjects through careful manipulation of stimuli, nor has this comparison been made across the musical and visual domains. This listener study aims to uncover the relative influence of dynamic and schematic expectations in musical and visual stimuli, and investigate the role of expertise in forming expectations by testing both musicians and non-musicians. Our findings suggest that musicians are indeed more sensitive than non-musicians to the dynamic and schematic properties of musical stimuli, and they generally produce a wider range of expectedness ratings than non-musicians. Interestingly, musicians also interpret schematic information in the visual condition differently than non-musicians, suggesting that musical training may have influenced their expectation mechanisms more generally.