Kate Stevens

• Biography
• Areas of Research / Teaching Expertise
• Grants / Current Projects
• Publications
• Contact Details

Biography

As a cognitive psychologist, I apply experimental methods to study cognition of complex auditory and temporal phenomena. Doctoral research investigated musical training and pattern recognition in human listeners and artificial neural network models (Stevens & Latimer, 1992, 1997). Postdoctoral research at the University of Queensland included novel application of simple recurrent networks to temporal, musical prediction tasks (Stevens & Wiles, 1994). In experimental research, students, colleagues and I investigate general mechanisms operating in the recognition of music (Brennan & Stevens, 2002; McAuley, Stevens & Humphreys, 2004; Stevens & Gallagher, 2004; Olsen, Stevens & Tardieu, 2007) and auditory signals (Coward & Stevens, 2004; Keller & Stevens, 2004; Perry et al. 2007). Research into choreographic cognition has led to theorising and experimentation on embodied cognition and memory for movement.

As Deputy Director of MARCS (1999-2007), I coordinated two successful LIEF grant applications awarded to UWS, and to the Universities of NSW, Sydney and Canberra. The first established a Movement Analysis Lab incorporating Peak Motus, Optotrak, PowerLab facilities, and a custom-designed portable Audience Response Facility. The second provided infrastructure for multimodal recording and analysis. With Robert Dale and Denis Burnham, Kate co-convenes the ARC Research Network in Human Communication Science (HCSNet).

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Areas of Research / Teaching Expertise

Human Learning and Cognition
Applied Cognition and Human Performance

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Grants / Current Projects

ARC Discovery Project 2009-2011
Expecting the Unexpected: Learning Complex Temporal and Rhythmic
Relations, Stevens, Tillmann, & Keller

ARC Thinking Systems Special Initiative 2006-2010
From Talking Heads to Thinking Heads: A Reserch Platform for Human Communication Science (CI #3), Burnham, Dale, Stevens et al.

ARC Discovery Project 2007-2009
Music, Arousal, and Mood: The Role of Loudness and Loudness Change in Cross Cultural Music Perception, Stevens, Thompson & Cross

ARC Research Network Scheme 2004-2009
Human Communication Science Network

ARC Linkage Project 2005-2008
Intention and Serendipity: Investigating Improvisation, Symbolism and Memory in Creating Australian Contemporary Dance

ARC LIEF 2006
SeeHear! Multimodal Recording and Analysis Facility

ATSB 2005-2006
Design and Evaluation of Auditory Icons as Informative Warning Signals

ARC Linkage International 2003-2004
Music cognition in infants, children and adults

RIKEN Brain Science Institute 2004
Correlates of Recognition of Body Movement in Dance

ARC Linkage Project 2002-2004
Conceiving connections: Increasing industry viability through analysis of spectator responses to communication in dance performance (CI #3)

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Publications

2004 - 2009

BOOKS

Grove, R., Stevens, C., & McKechnie. S. (Eds.). (2005). Thinking in four dimensions: Creativity and cognition in contemporary dance. Carlton: Melbourne University Press.

JOURNAL ARTICLES

Opacic, T., Stevens C., & Tillmann, B. (2009). Unspoken knowledge: implicit learning of structured human dance movement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 35(6), 1570-1577.

Stevens, C., Schubert, E., Haszard Morris, R., Frear, M., Chen, J., Healey, S., Schoknecht, C., & Hansen, S. (2009). Cognition and the temporal arts: Investigating audience response to dance using PDAs that record continuous data during live performance. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 67(9), 800-813.

Stevens, C., Brennan, D., Petocz, A., & Howell, C. (2009). Designing informative warning signals: Effects of indicator type, modality and task demand on recognition speed and accuracy. Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 5, 84-90.

Stevens, C., Schubert, E., Wang, S., Kroos, C., & Halovic, S. (2009). Moving with and without music: scaling and lapsing in time in the performance of contemporary dance. Music Perception Special Issue, 26(5), 451-464.

Broughton, M., & Stevens, C. (2009). Music, movement and marimba: An investigation of the role of movement and gesture in communicating musical expression to an audience. Psychology of Music, 37(2), 137-153.

Petocz, A., Keller, P., & Stevens, C. (2008). Auditory warnings, signal-referent relations and natural indicators: re-thinking theory and application. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 14, 165-178.

Okazaki, Y., Abrahamyan, A., Stevens, C., Ioannides, A. A. (2008). The timing of face selectivity and attentional modulation in visual processing. Neuroscience, 152, 1130-1144.

Broughton, M., & Stevens, C. Music, movement and marimba: An investigation of the role of movement and gesture in communicating musical expression to an audience. Psychology of Music, accepted November 30 2007, in press.

Perry, N., Stevens, C., Wiggins, M., & Howell, C. (2007). Cough once for danger: An experimental investigation of auditory icons as informative warning signals in civil aviation. Human Factors 49(6), 1061-1071.

Jones, C., Berry, L., & Stevens, C. (2007). Synthesized speech intelligibility ad persuasion: speech rate and non-native listeners. Computer Speech and Language, 21, 641-651.

Stevens, C., Walker, G., Boyer, M., & Gallagher, M. (2007). Severe tinnitus and its effect on selective and divided attention. International Journal of Audiology, 46, 208-216.

Schubert, E., & Stevens, C. (2006). The role of implied harmony and effect of musical expertise on judgments of melodic similarity. Journal of New Music Research, 35(2), 161-174.

Rossiter, S., Stevens C., & Walker, G. (2006). Tinnitus and its effect on working memory and attention. Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research, 49, 1-11.

Stevens, C., & McKechnie, S. (2005a). Thinking in action: Thought made visible in contemporary dance. Cognitive Processing, 6(4), 243-252.

Schellenberg, E. G., Bigand, E., Poulin, B., Garnier, C., & Stevens C. (2005). Childrens implicit knowledge of harmony in Western music. Developmental Science, 8(6), 551-566.

Stevens, C., Lees, N., Vonwiller, J. & Burnham, D. (2005). On-line experimental methods to evaluate text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis: Effects of voice gender and signal quality on intelligibility, naturalness and preference. Computer Speech & Language, 19(2), 129-146.

Stevens, C. (2004). Cross-cultural studies of musical pitch and time. Acoustical Science and Technology, 25(6). 433-438.

McAuley, J. D., Stevens, C., & Humphreys, M. S. (2004). Play it again: did this melody occur frequently or was it heard more recently? The role of stimulus familiarity in the formation of episodic memories for music. Acta Psychologica, 116, 93-108.

Stevens, C. J, & Gallagher, M. J. (2004). The development of mental models for auditory events: Relational complexity and discrimination of pitch and duration. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 22, 569-583.

Keller, P., & Stevens, C. (2004). Meaning from environmental sounds: Types of signal-referent relations and their effect on recognizing auditory icons. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 10, 3-12.

Coward, S. W., & Stevens, C. J. (2004). Extracting meaning from sound: Nomic mappings, everyday listening, and perceiving object size from frequency. The Psychological Record, 54, 349-364.

BOOK CHAPTERS

Stevens, C., & Byron, T. (2009). Universals in music processing. In S. Hallam, I. Cross, & M. Thaut (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology (pp. 14-23), Oxford University Press.

McKechnie, S., & Stevens, C. (2009). Knowledge unspoken: contemporary dance and the cycle of practice-led research, basic and applied research, and research-led practice. In H. Smith & R. Dean (Eds). Research-led practice and practice-led research (pp. 84-103). Edinburgh University Press.

McKechnie, S., & Stevens, C. J. (2009). Visible thought: choreographic cognition in creating, performing, and watching contemporary dance. In J. Butterworth & L. Wildschut (Eds.), Contemporary Choreography (pp. 38-51). Routledge.

Stevens, C., & Petocz, A. (2009). The user knows: considering the cognitive contribution of the user in the design of auditory warnings. In D. Harris (Ed.) Engineering, Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, Human-Computer Interaction International 2009. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 5639 (pp. 126-135). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

McDougall, S., Forsythe, A., Isherwood, S., Petocz, A., Reppa, I., & Stevens, C. (2009). The use of multimodal representations in icon interpretation. In D. Harris (Ed.) Engineering, Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, Human-Computer Interaction International 2009. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 5639 (pp. 62-70). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

McKechnie, S., & Stevens, C. J. (2009). Visible thought: choreographic cognition in creating, performing, and watching contemporary dance. In J. Butterworth & L. Wildschut (Eds.), Contemporary Choreography. Routledge. In press.

Stevens, C., & Byron, T. (2009). Universals in music processing. In S. Hallam, I. Cross, & M. Thaut (Eds.) Handbook of Music Psychology. Oxford University Press. In press.

Stevens, C. (2009). Its about time! Perceiving events and acquiring expectancies. Invited One Step Further contribution  Chapter 4 Sensation & Perception, D. Westen, L. Burton, & R. Kowalski, Psychology: Australian and New Zealand 2nd Edition. Milton, Qld: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Wilkie, S., Stevens, C., & Dean, R. (2008). Psychoacoustic manipulation of the sound induced illusory flash. CMMR (Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval) 2007, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

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