Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Participants often categorize musical melodies (“themes”) based on perceptual features (e.g. loudness, fastness) in-stead of structural or relational features (e.g. pitch, rhythm) (Lamont & Dibben, 2001; Ziv & Eitan, 2007). In the present study,we investigate whether within-category analogical comparison (Markman & Gentner, 1993) influences participants to cate-gorize musical themes based on relational features, a prediction from structure-mapping theory (Gentner, 1983). Participantscompleted a forced-choice triad task where they had to choose whether one theme (relational match) or another (perceptualmatch) best fit the target theme. In a “no-compare” condition (between-subjects), participants heard one target theme. In a“compare” condition, participants heard and compared two target themes. Initial results indicate that participants who com-pared two themes chose more relational matches. We found this result for Western Classical themes and popular music chordprogressions. These results and their implications are discussed with respects to analogical processing and musical categoriza-tion.