NOTE: As of 2002, I am longer active in academia, and I am no longer at OSU. The .pdf and text versions (above) of my vita are up to date as of August, 2004, but the following HTML version is somewhat stale. But you can offer me a great job based on it if you want to :-).

Education

• Ph.D., Cognitive Science, Brown University, 1999.
• B.A., Linguistics, U.C. Santa Cruz, 1990.
• B.A., Computer and Information Science, U.C. Santa Cruz, 1980.

Research and Interests

More recent research (including my dissertation) has addressed the role of auditory feedback in human behavior, focussing on music performance and rhythmic finger tapping. My latest work (in collaboration with Caroline Palmer; see Finney and Palmer, 2001) addresses the role of auditory feedback in memory for music performance, demonstrating a robust facilitating effect of auditory feedback on music learning, but little or no effect of auditory feedback during music recall or performance.

Two other research areas are:

• The effects of delayed auditory feedback (DAF) on finger tapping. Finney and Warren (in press) (also see my dissertation) showed that the delay causing maximal impairment (the "critical interval") is not fixed but is rate-dependent, and suggested that the impairing effects of DAF may be due to participants entraining to the rhythmic stimulus.

• The effects of altered auditory feedback on music performance. Although DAF robustly impairs music performance, altering the pitches that performers hear has little effect (Finney, 1997). Thus, ``auditory feedback" cannot be viewed as a single entity; different components of feedback may have quite different effects.

For these experiments, I developed a flexible Linux-based ``real-time" (i.e., verified millisecond resolution for data collection and stimulus presentation) software package for auditory feedback manipulation experiments using MIDI equipment; this package is available for general use and can be downloaded from The FTAP Home Page In the process of developing FTAP, I learned a lot about doing ``real-time" programming in Linux, and wrote this up to aid other labs in developing software for psychology experiments under Linux (Finney, 2001b).

I am currently affiliated with Caroline Palmer's Music Cognition Lab in the Department of Psychology at Ohio State University.

Published papers

• Finney, S.A. and Warren, W. H. (in press). Delayed auditory feedback and rhythmic tapping: Evidence for a critical interval shift. Perception and Psychophysics
• Finney, S.A. (2001b). Real-time data collection in Linux: A case study . Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 33, pp 167-173.
  (Finney (2001b) in .pdf format.)
• Finney, S.A. (2001a). FTAP: A Linux-based program for tapping and music experiments. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 33, pp 65-72.
  (Finney (2001a) in .pdf format.)
• Protopapas, A., Finney, S.A., and Eimas, P.D. (1999). Baseline conditions in structural induction: Comment on Pitt, Smith, and Klein (1998). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25, 1472-1475.
• Finney, S.A. (1997). Auditory feedback and musical keyboard performance. Music Perception, 15, 153-174.
• Finney, S.A., Protopapas, A., and Eimas, P.D. (1996). Attentional allocation to syllables in American English. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 893-909.

Published abstracts

• Finney, S.A. & Palmer, C. (2000). Music performance and theories of memory. Abstracts of the Psychonomic Society, 5, 70.
• Finney, S.A. (1999). Timing relationships in rhythmic tapping and music performance with delayed auditory feedback. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106, 2260.
• Finney, S.A. & Warren, W.H. (1999). Delayed auditory feedback: Evidence for a critical interval shift. Abstracts of the Psychonomic Society, 4, 48.

Papers submitted for publication

• Finney, S. A., and Palmer, C. (2001) Auditory feedback and memory for music performance: Sound evidence for an encoding effect.
• Protopas, A., Finney, S. A., and Eimas, P.D. (2000) Attentional allocation to syllabic boundaries in English first-syllable stress words.

Dissertation