Expectation adaptation for rare cadences in music: Item order matters in repetition priming

Humans make predictions about future events in many domains, including when they listen to music. Previous accounts of harmonic expectation in music have emphasised the role of implicit musical knowledge acquired in the long term through the mechanism of statistical learning. However, it is not known whether listeners can adapt their expectations for unusual harmonies in the short term through repetition priming, and whether the extent of any short-term adaptation depends on the unfolding statistical structure of the music. To explore these possibilities, we presented 150 participants with phrases from Bach chorales that ended with a cadence that was either a priori likely or unlikely based on the long-term statistical structure of the corpus of chorales. While holding the 50–50 incidence of likely vs. unlikely cadences constant, we manipulated the order in which these phrases were presented such that the local probability of hearing an unlikely cadence changed throughout the experiment. For each phrase, participants provided two judgements: (a) a prospective rating of how confident they were in their expectations for the cadence, and (b) a retrospective rating of how well the presented cadence matched their expectations. While confidence ratings increased over the course of the experiment, the rate of change decreased as the local probability of an unexpected cadence increased. Participants' expectations favoured likely cadences over unlikely cadences on average, but their expectation ratings for unlikely cadences increased at a faster rate over the course of the experiment than for likely cadences, particularly when the local probability of hearing an unlikely cadence was high. Thus, despite entrenched long-term statistics about cadences, listeners can indeed adapt to unusual musical harmonies and are sensitive to the local statistical structure of the musical environment. We suggest that this adaptation is an instance of Bayesian belief updating, a domain-general process that accounts for expectation adaptation in multiple domains.