Why Would Numerosity Affect Dissonance?

The Rewards of Complexity:
  • significant perceptual difficulties arise with increasing # of streams

  • if the parsing of multiple streams is difficult, why do listeners enjoy multipart music?

  • Huron (2001) proposed that successful parsing of the auditory scene may result in a positively valenced limbic response.
    • the brain "rewards itself" for assembling a coherent representation of the external world based on the available cues.
    • also proposed that the magnitude of the limbic "reward" is proportional to the difficulty of the task.
An Analogy: random-dot stereograms