Subject: Re: Difference between cognition and perception? From: Odd Torleiv Furnes <o.t.furnes(at)HF.UIO.NO> Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2004 20:23:56 +0200Martin Braun wrote: >If you hear a traditional Bulgarian women choir for the first time, the >"contribution of cognitive processes" may be close to zero, because you >might not know any word at all of the alien musical "language". But you will >not doubt that it's music, and you even might like it very much. First of all, it is very unlikely that you will ever encounter any music that does not incorporate some sort of melodic, harmonic or rhythmic pattern that you are familiar with. Second, as the prime aspect of listening to music probably is that of pattern detection, memory - both of the recent unfolding events and of stored musical schemas - is active. Although pattern detection in the Gestalt notion of the term can be assigned to perception, the process of pattern retrieval from memory is clearly a matter of cognition. Pattern detection probably moves from perception to cognition dependent on the level of resolution. Thirdly, given that listening to music involves a process of pattern comparison through memory retrieval, the assumption that the brain is cognitively more passive when confronted with something unknown compared to when the encountered object is familiar is questionable. Torleiv Furnes PhD student Department of Musicology University of Oslo Norway