EVIDENCE FOR A CENTRAL REPRESENTATION OF INSTRUMENT TIMBRE

An information processing account of perception seeks to delineate the stages of processing through which a stimulus passes and determine th e properties of the representation at each stage. Research in phonetic perception has identified two stages, the second of which is thought to encode abstract acoustic attributes of sounds. The present study pr ovided a further test of this proposal by assessing whether nonphoneti c stimuli could yield results similar to those obtained with phonetic stimuli. Five selective adaptation experiments were carried out with a trumpet-piano timbre continuum. Two manipulations were used to measur e abstract encoding: cross-ear presentation of adaptor and test series , and the use of adaptors that were acoustically different from the co ntinuum endpoints. The results provide evidence for an abstract repres entation of timbre. The similarity of the findings to those in the pho netic adaptation literature is discussed.