Auditory and visual short-term memory: Influence of material type, contour, and musical expertise.

Talamini, Francesca; Blain, Salomé; Ginzburg, Jérémie; Houix, Olivier; Bouchet, Patrick; Grassi, Massimo; Tillmann, Barbara; Caclin, Anne

doi:10.31219/osf.io/e53n6

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…After a delay, a second stimulus is presented (S2) and participants have to report whether S1 and S2 are identical or different. This task has the advantage of allowing for the use of different kinds of materials (verbal, musical, environmental sound…, e.g., Talamini et al., 2021) and entails the three memorization steps of encoding (during S1), retention (during the delay), and retrieval (during S2) without relying on a production phase (as required in recall tasks). Hence, the DMST appears to be a well‐suited paradigm to assess the development of auditory STM (for both musical and verbal materials) in children.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of auditory cognition in 5‐ to 10‐year‐old children: Focus on musical and verbal short‐term memory

Ginzburg

Moulin

Fornoni

et al. 2021

Developmental Science

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Developmental aspects of auditory cognition were investigated in 5-to-10-year-old children (n = 100). Musical and verbal short-term memory (STM) were assessed by means of delayed matching-to-sample tasks (DMST) (comparison of two four-item sequences separated by a silent retention delay), with two levels of difficulty. For musical and verbal materials, children's performance increased from 5 years to about 7 years of age, then remained stable up to 10 years of age, with performance remaining inferior to performance of young adults. Children and adults performed better with verbal material than with musical material. To investigate auditory cognition beyond STM, we assessed speech-in-noise perception with a four-alternative forced-choice task with two conditions of phonological difficulty and two levels of cocktail-party noise intensity. Partial correlations, factoring out the effect of age, showed a significant link between musical STM and speech-in-noise perception in the condition with increased noise intensity. Our findings reveal that auditory STM improves over development with a critical phase around 6-7 years of age, yet these abilities appear to be still immature at 10 years. Musical and verbal STM might in particular share procedural and serial order processes. Furthermore, musical STM and the ability to perceive relevant speech signals in cocktail-party noise might rely on shared cognitive resources, possibly related to pitch encoding. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that auditory STM is assessed with the same paradigm for musical and verbal material during childhood, providing perspectives regarding diagnosis and remediation in developmental learning disorders.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of auditory cognition in 5‐ to 10‐year‐old children: Focus on musical and verbal short‐term memory

Ginzburg

Moulin

Fornoni

et al. 2021

Developmental Science

Self Cite

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“…In a more recent study, visual and auditory short-term memory in musicians and non-musicians was compared using different categories of stimuli (i.e. verbal, non-verbal with contour, non-verbal without contour) 39 . Stimulus sequences with contour included up and down variations based on loudness (auditory condition) or luminance (visual condition).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Musical expertise shapes visual-melodic memory integration

Ploner

Hoffmann

Schmidt

2022

Preprint

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Music can act as a powerful mnemonic device that can elicit vivid episodic memories. However, how musical information is integrated with non-musical information is largely unknown. Here, we investigated whether and how musical expertise modulates binding of melodies and visual information into integrated memory representations. We reasoned that the significant mnemonic demands of musicianship might alter the underlying integration process and reveal mechanisms by which music promotes retrieval of non-musical memories. Professional musicians and musical laypersons learned overlapping pairs of everyday objects and melodies (AB- and BC-pairs, object-melody and melody-object pairs). Participants were then tested for memory of studied pairs (direct trials) and for inferential AC-decisions (indirect trials). Although musicians showed a higher overall performance than non-musicians, both groups performed well above chance level in both trial types. Non-musicians reacted faster in indirect compared to direct trials, whereas the reverse pattern was found in musicians. Differential correlations of trial type performance between groups further suggested that non-musicians efficiently formed integrated ABC-triplets already during the encoding phase of the task, while musicians separately memorized AB- and BC-pairs and recombined them at retrieval for AC-decisions. Our results suggest that integrative encoding is a default mechanism for integration of musical and non-musical stimuli that works with great efficacy even in musically untrained subjects and may contribute to the everyday experience of music-evoked episodic memories. By contrast, recombination at retrieval seems to be an advanced strategy for memory integration that critically depends on an expert ability to maintain and discriminate musical stimuli across extended memory delays.

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“…For short-term and working memory tasks, the memory advantage of musicians was large for tonal stimuli, moderate for verbal stimuli and small or null when visuospatial stimuli were involved. In a more recent study, visual and auditory short-term memory in musicians and non-musicians was compared using different categories of stimuli (i.e., verbal, non-verbal with contour, non-verbal without contour; Talamini et al, 2021). Stimulus sequences with contour included up and down variations based on loudness (auditory condition) or luminance (visual condition).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Musical expertise shapes visual-melodic memory integration

Hoffmann

Schmidt²,

Ploner³

2022

Front. Psychol.

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Music can act as a mnemonic device that can elicit multiple memories. How musical and non-musical information integrate into complex cross-modal memory representations has however rarely been investigated. Here, we studied the ability of human subjects to associate visual objects with melodies. Musical laypersons and professional musicians performed an associative inference task that tested the ability to form and memorize paired associations between objects and melodies (“direct trials”) and to integrate these pairs into more complex representations where melodies are linked with two objects across trials (“indirect trials”). We further investigated whether and how musical expertise modulates these two processes. We analyzed accuracy and reaction times (RTs) of direct and indirect trials in both groups. We reasoned that the musical and cross-modal memory demands of musicianship might modulate performance in the task and might thus reveal mechanisms that underlie the association and integration of visual information with musical information. Although musicians showed a higher overall memory accuracy, non-musicians’ accuracy was well above chance level in both trial types, thus indicating a significant ability to associate and integrate musical with visual information even in musically untrained subjects. However, non-musicians showed shorter RTs in indirect compared to direct trials, whereas the reverse pattern was found in musicians. Moreover, accuracy of direct and indirect trials correlated significantly in musicians but not in non-musicians. Consistent with previous accounts of visual associative memory, we interpret these findings as suggestive of at least two complimentary mechanisms that contribute to visual-melodic memory integration. (I) A default mechanism that mainly operates at encoding of complex visual-melodic associations and that works with surprising efficacy even in musically untrained subjects. (II) A retrieval-based mechanism that critically depends on an expert ability to maintain and discriminate visual-melodic associations across extended memory delays. Future studies may investigate how these mechanisms contribute to the everyday experience of music-evoked memories.

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Auditory and visual short-term memory: Influence of material type, contour, and musical expertise.

Cited by 3 publications

References 59 publications

Development of auditory cognition in 5‐ to 10‐year‐old children: Focus on musical and verbal short‐term memory

Development of auditory cognition in 5‐ to 10‐year‐old children: Focus on musical and verbal short‐term memory

Musical expertise shapes visual-melodic memory integration

Musical expertise shapes visual-melodic memory integration

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