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

Abstract

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.

A specific relationship between musical sophistication and auditory working memory

“…However, cognitive advantages to musicians have not been consistently demonstrated and it may be that these effects are due to people with higher cognitive scores taking or persisting with music lessons or that there are links to preexisting innate interindividual differences 10 , 11 . There is evidence to suggest that musicians have better memory over shorter time scales than non-musicians and that this effect is moderated by the type of stimuli 12 . Although some studies have shown that musicians outperformed non-musicians in tasks of visual working memory, this has not been consistently demonstrated.…”

“…The authors concluded that working memory updating abilities might improve via sustained engagement in music. Auditory working memory for tones is an explicit cognitive task that has been examined in a number of studies in which improved performance is shown in groups of musicians compared to non-musicians 12 , 17 , 18 . Musicians have also been shown to have improved sustained attention and attention to pitch direction, as well as better general auditory cognition in terms of phonological working memory and speech-in-noise perception 19 – 22 .…”

No link between Speech-in-noise perception and Auditory short-term memory – evidence from a large cohort of older and younger listeners

“…According to models of auditory memory (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968;Christophel et al, 2017), the pattern to memorise may be firstly stored in a auditory-specific sensory memory store with high fidelity, and then transferred to a distributed network of brain areas involved in more abstract representations (e.g., of the contour). This second stage may be more dependent on listeners cognitive ability, encoding strategies, expertise and attention (Cowan, 2008;Talamini, Altoè, Carretti, & Grassi, 2017;Talamini et al, 2022).…”

A specific relationship between musical sophistication and auditory working memory

“…It has been argued that the effect of musical sophistication on perceptual tasks is determined by cognitive abilities (Ahissar et al, 2009). Auditory working memory for tones is an explicit cognitive task that has been examined in a number of studies in which improved performance is shown in groups of musicians compared to non-musicians (Ding et al, 2018; Talamini et al, 2021; Williamson et al, 2010). Musicians have also been shown to have improved sustained attention (Carey et al, 2015) and attention to pitch direction (Ouimet et al, 2012), as well as better general auditory cognition in terms of phonological working memory and speech-in-noise perception (Parbery-Clark et al, 2011, 2009).…”