Attentional flexibility and memory capacity in conductors and pianists

Abstract

Individuals with high working memory (WM) capacity also tend to have better selective and divided attention. Although both capacities are essential for skilled performance in many areas, evidence for potential training and expertise effects is scarce. We investigated the attentional flexibility of musical conductors by comparing them to equivalently trained pianists. Conductors must focus their attention both on individual instruments and on larger sections of different instruments. We studied students and professionals in both domains to assess the contributions of age and training to these skills. Participants completed WM span tests for auditory and visual (notated) pitches and timing durations, as well as long-term memory tests. In three dichotic attention tasks, they were asked to detect small pitch and timing deviations from two melodic streams presented in baseline (separate streams), selective-attention (concentrating on only one stream), and divided-attention (concentrating on targets in both streams simultaneously) conditions. Conductors were better than pianists in detecting timing deviations in divided attention, and experts detected more targets than students. We found no group differences for WM capacity or for pitch deviations in the attention tasks, even after controlling for the older age of the experts. Musicians' WM spans across multimodal conditions were positively related to selective and divided attention. High-WM participants also had shorter reaction times in selective attention. Taken together, conductors showed higher attentional flexibility in successfully switching between different foci of attention.Keywords Selective and divided attention . Working memory . Long-term memory . Multimodal . Expertise . Cognitive aging Auditory processing, by its nature, requires considerable investment of executive resources. Auditory information is evanescent and can vary rapidly over short time intervals. Thus, both attending to the signal and buffering of information in the auditory stream are vital to comprehending everything from speech to birdsong to music. In this investigation, we examined the attentional and working memory (WM) capacities, and the relation between them, in a profession that should demand the highest level of auditory executive capacity: musical conductors.Several kinds of attention are essential to parse the auditory world. Considering first selective attention, Fritz, Elhilali, David, and Shamma (2007) observed that in everyday situations we constantly must extract features such as harmonicity, intensity, duration, and rhythm in order to group, identify, and locate auditory objects, even above and beyond the challenge of following one conversation among many, as in the "cocktail party problem" (Cherry, 1953). In other words, we need proficiency at auditory scene analysis (Bregman, 1990;Fritz et al., 2007). We normally accomplish this analysis quite well with both top-down and bottom-up control processes-by, for instance, increasing activity in relevant and decreasin...

The Relationships Among Interval Identification, Pitch Error Detection, and Stimulus Timbre by Preservice Teachers

“…When junior-and senior-level music education majors played piano while simultaneously listening to an ensemble, their error detection ability decreased (Napoles, Babb, Bowers, Hankle, & Zrust, 2016). In addition, conductors have shown superior divided attention ability compared to pianists for timing tasks but not for pitch tasks-and experts to a greater extent than students (Wöllner & Halpern, 2016). This suggests timing elements prevail over pitch elements and lends support to the recent suggestion that pitch elements should be considered independently of timing elements (Nichols, Wöllner, & Halpern, 2018).…”

The role of divided attention and expertise in melody recognition

“…Participants with high WM seem to perform better during divided attention (Colflesh & Conway, 2007) and high musical expertise may come with enhanced WM capacity for auditory material (Schulze, Zysset, Mueller, Friederici, & Koelsch, 2011). However, professional conductors and pianists show no significant differences in terms of WM, yet conductors outperform musicians in musical divided-attention tasks (Wöllner & Halpern, 2016). Furthermore, WM capacity seems to be task- and domain-dependent and does not necessarily generalize to other domains such as visual-spatial WM tasks (Hansen, Wallentin, & Vuust, 2013; Wöllner & Halpern, 2016).…”

“…In the context of music specifically, Wöllner and Halpern (2016) reported that in general, expertise increases performance when two music-related tasks are performed simultaneously. Compared to undivided attention, musicians and non-musicians alike are detrimentally affected by divided attention, however, musicians tend to rely on perceptual based coping strategies whereas non-musicians rely on selective attention (Bigand, McAdams, & Forêt, 2000).…”

Neural Entrainment to Polyrhythms: A Comparison of Musicians and Non-musicians

“…Keller and Burnham (2005) found similar results in a dual-task paradigm that examined the recognition and reproduction of matched-metrical and mismatched-metrical rhythmic patterns. In a recent study, Wöllner and Halpern (2016) asked expert and novice conductors and pianists to detect pitch and timing deviations of target tones in selective- and divided-attention tasks (focus on one of two melodic streams, and focus on both streams, respectively). They found that in both tasks experts detected more targets than students.…”