BackgroundSeveral studies have found that musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks, but this is not always the case, and the strength of this apparent advantage is unknown. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis with the aim of clarifying whether musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks.MethodsEducation Source; PEP (WEB)—Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing; Psychology and Behavioral Science (EBSCO); PsycINFO (Ovid); PubMed; ScienceDirect—AllBooks Content (Elsevier API); SCOPUS (Elsevier API); SocINDEX with Full Text (EBSCO) and Google Scholar were searched for eligible studies. The selected studies involved two groups of participants: young adult musicians and nonmusicians. All the studies included memory tasks (loading long-term, short-term or working memory) that contained tonal, verbal or visuospatial stimuli. Three meta-analyses were run separately for long-term memory, short-term memory and working memory.ResultsWe collected 29 studies, including 53 memory tasks. The results showed that musicians performed better than nonmusicians in terms of long-term memory, g = .29, 95% CI (.08–.51), short-term memory, g = .57, 95% CI (.41–.73), and working memory, g = .56, 95% CI (.33–.80). To further explore the data, we included a moderator (the type of stimulus presented, i.e., tonal, verbal or visuospatial), which was found to influence the effect size for short-term and working memory, but not for long-term memory. In terms of short-term and working memory, the musicians’ advantage was large with tonal stimuli, moderate with verbal stimuli, and small or null with visuospatial stimuli.ConclusionsThe three meta-analyses revealed a small effect size for long-term memory, and a medium effect size for short-term and working memory, suggesting that musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks. Moreover, the effect of the moderator suggested that, the type of stimuli influences this advantage.

Musicians have superior performances compared to nonmusicians in many auditory perception tasks. This superiority extends to memory tasks such as the digit span. Literature suggests that the musicians' advantage unfolds along two axes: sensory modality (musicians perform better when the task is auditory) and task complexity (musicians tend to perform better in the forward and not-for example-backward digit span). In addition, it is unclear whether there are specific music abilities linked with improved performance in the digit span. Here, musicians and nonmusicians performed a digit span task that was presented aurally, visually, or audiovisually. The task was performed with or without a concurrent task (i.e., articulatory suppression) in order to explore the role of rehearsal strategies and also manipulate task complexity. Finally, music abilities of all participants were assessed using the Profile of Music Perception Skills (PROMS) test. Musicians had larger spans than nonmusicians regardless of the sensory modality and the concurrent task. In addition, the auditory and audiovisual spans (but not visual) were correlated with one subscale of the PROMS test. Findings suggest a general advantage of musicians over nonmusicians in verbal working memory tasks, with a possible role of sensory modality and task complexity

Various reports suggest that the pitch height of musical tones may be represented along a mental space, with lower pitch heights represented on the left or lower sectors and higher pitch heights represented on the right or upper sectors of the mental space. Given that in Western languages the loudness of tones is often addressed spatially, with loud sounds referred to as “high” and quiet sounds referred to as “low,” here we investigated whether loudness might also have a spatial representation. Participants judged whether a tone was louder or quieter than a reference tone, by pressing two keys: one at the top and the other at the bottom of a response box. Participants were faster in a situation where they pressed the key at the top to report louder sounds, and the key at the bottom to report quieter sounds, than vice versa. This result supports the view that loudness, like other types of magnitudes, might be represented spatially.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a large impact on various aspects of life, but questions about its effects on close relationships remain largely unanswered. In the present study, we examined perceived changes in relationship satisfaction at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic by using an international sample of 3,243 individuals from 67 different countries, mostly from Italy, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In April and May 2020, participants responded to an online survey that included questions about relationship satisfaction, their satisfaction before the pandemic, other relationship aspects (e.g., shared time), special circumstances (e.g., mobility restrictions), and enduring dispositions (e.g., insecure attachment). A decline in time shared with one’s partner was most strongly associated with perceived decreases in relationship satisfaction, resulting in a different pattern of findings for cohabiting and non-cohabiting individuals. Among the most influential moderators were anxious and avoidant attachment. The findings offer insights into both aggravating and protecting factors in couples’ responses to pandemic-related stressors.

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Short-term memory has mostly been investigated with verbal or visuospatial stimuli and less so with other categories of stimuli. Moreover, the influence of sensory modality has been explored almost solely in the verbal domain. The present study compared visual and auditory short-term memory for different types of materials, aiming to understand whether sensory modality and material type can influence short-term memory performance. Furthermore, we aimed to assess if music expertise can modulate memory performance, as previous research has reported better auditory memory (and to some extent, visual memory), and better auditory contour recognition for musicians than non-musicians. To do so, we adapted the same recognition paradigm (delayed-matching to sample) across different types of stimuli. In each trial, participants (musicians and non-musicians) were presented with two sequences of events, separated by a silent delay, and had to indicate whether the two sequences were identical or different. The performance was compared for auditory and visual materials belonging to three different categories: (1) verbal (i.e., syllables); (2) nonverbal (i.e., that could not be easily denominated) with contour (based on loudness or luminance variations); and (3) nonverbal without contour (pink noise sequences or kanji letters sequences). Contour and no-contour conditions referred to whether the sequence can entail (or not) a contour (i.e., a pattern of up and down changes) based on non-pitch features. Results revealed a selective advantage of musicians for auditory no-contour stimuli and for contour stimuli (both visual and auditory), suggesting that musical expertise is associated with specific short-term memory advantages in domains close to the trained domain, also extending cross-modally when stimuli have contour information. Moreover, our results suggest a role of encoding strategies (i.e., how the material is represented mentally during the task) for short-term-memory performance.

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Mental imagery plays an important role in various contexts of life, involving cognitive resources such as memory, learning, spatial representation, and reasoning. The vividness of mental images depends on different factors, including personal expertise in a certain field. For instance, musicians have been found to possess better auditory imagery abilities than non-musicians for both musical and non-musical sounds. Only a few studies have tried to find out if this advantage is selective for auditory stimuli, however, with contradictory results so far (i.e., some studies supporting an advantage for mental imagery in general and some supporting an advantage for auditory mental imagery in particular). This study therefore investigated auditory and visual mental imagery in individuals with and without formal musical training. Thirty-six formally trained musicians, 33 self-taught musicians, and 33 non-musicians completed two questionnaires assessing the vividness of their auditory and visual mental imagery. They also completed measures of aptitude for music and general cognitive abilities. Both groups of musicians reported greater vividness of auditory (non-musical) imagery, but not visual imagery, than non-musicians. Thus musical experience, regardless of the type of training undergone by musicians, is linked to superior self-reported auditory mental imagery for everyday sounds, but not mental imagery in general.