Steffen Alexander Herff

Steffen graduated in Psychology at the Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf in Germany before going on to complete his PhD at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development focusing on 'Memory for Melody' in 2017, under the supervision of Prof. Roger Dean and Dr. Kirk Olsen.After his PhD, Steffen secured a DAAD-UA grant to conduct the "Noisy Ear" project in Germany, exploring context effects of background noise on memory before accepting a position at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore, where he worked on Statistical Learning and memory paradigms in the auditory domain.Steffen's research is situated at the intersection between Memory, Music, and Neuroscience. His diverse interests and background have made him an integral part of many inter-disciplinary projects. These projects range from fundamental memory, learning, and perception research, over social negotiation between musical co-performers and the creation of new compositional tools, to non-invasive and invasive brain imaging in musical rhythm perception as well as brain stimulation to modulate memory encoding. Steffen strongly believes that inter-disciplinary research is the key to tackle complex, multi-facetted research questions.

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Hearing functional harmony in jazz: A perceptual study on music-theoretical accounts of extended tonality

Gabriele Cecchetti, Christoph Finkensiep, Daniel Harasim, Steffen Alexander Herff, Martin Alois Rohrmeier

Functional harmony is an integral part of many repertoires in the Western musical practices, including both diatonic and extended tonality. In the latter context, music-theoretical accounts suggest that the three octatonic equivalence classes (OECs) consisting of pitch-classes related by stacked minor-third intervals may be associated with tonic (T), dominant (D), and subdominant (S) functions. Whether this theoretical description of music is also relevant to the perception of music has not yet been tested empirically. In this study, 100 participants familiar with Western repertoires were presented with jazz chord progressions containing chord substitutions. When each stimulus had been played, participants predicted how many more chords they would have expected to hear before the progression could reach a plausible conclusion. We computed the similarity of responses for pairs of stimuli containing different harmonic substitutions and modeled such similarity values based on different measures of harmonic relatedness between substitutions. Data show that the OEC membership of substitutions strongly predicts the similarity of participants' completion ratings. Bayesian mixed-effects modeling of similarity values further showed a categorical distinction between D and S as functional categories, on one hand, and T, on the other hand. The data also appear to reflect the prevalent influence of rock and pop repertoires on the participants, encouraging further research into the influence of stylistic diversity and musical expertise. Overall, results contribute to the characterization of listeners' implicit knowledge of the principles of harmonic structure in extended tonality and support the relevance of OECs not only as descriptors of extended-tonal compositional practices but also parsimonious predictors of perceived functionality.

SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD2022

Information Processing Biases: The Effects of Negative Emotional Symptoms on Sampling Pleasant and Unpleasant Information

Steffen Alexander Herff

Although theories of emotion associate negative emotional symptoms with cognitive biases in information processing, they rarely specify the details. Here, we characterize cognitive biases in information processing of pleasant and unpleasant information, and how these biases covary with anxious and depressive symptoms, while controlling for general stress and cognitive ability. Forty undergraduates provided emotional symptom scores (Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21) and performed a statistical learning task that required predicting the next sound in a long sequence of either pleasant or unpleasant naturalistic sounds (blocks). We used an information weights framework to determine if the degree of behavioral change associated with observing either confirmatory ("B" follows "A") or disconfirmatory ("B" does not follow "A") transitions differs for pleasant and unpleasant sounds. Bayesian mixed-effects models revealed that negative emotional symptom scores predicted performance as well as processing biases of pleasant and unpleasant information. Further, information weights differed between pleasant and unpleasant information, and importantly, this difference varied based on symptom scores. For example, higher depressive symptom scores predicted a bias of underutilizing disconfirmatory information in unpleasant content. These findings have implications for models of emotional disorders by offering a mechanistic explanation and formalization of the associated cognitive biases.

AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC2022

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While theoretical and empirical insights suggest that the capacity to represent and process complex syntax is crucial in language as well as other domains, it is still unclear whether specific parsing mechanisms are also shared across domains. Focusing on the musical domain, we developed a novel behavioral paradigm to investigate whether a phenomenon of syntactic revision occurs in the processing of tonal melodies under analogous conditions as in language. We present the first proof-of-existence for syntactic revision in a set of tonally ambiguous melodies, supporting the relevance of syntactic representations and parsing with language-like characteristics in a nonlinguistic domain. Furthermore, we find no evidence for a modulatory effect of musical training, suggesting that a general cognitive capacity, rather than explicit knowledge and strategies, may underlie the observed phenomenon in music.

Wiley2022