Is there a specific Vivaldi effect on verbal memory functions? Evidence from listening to music in younger and older adults

Abstract

Brief exposure to music has been reported to lead to transient improvement of cognitive functions in no-music domains. Regarding the possible roles of working memory, processing of acoustic regularities, arousal and emotions in mediating the effects of music on subsequent cognition, the present study explored if brief listening to music might produce a subsequent transient change of verbal functions. A large sample ( n = 448) of younger (mean 28 years) and older (mean 72 years) individuals were studied to represent different background abilities. Verbal working memory (WM) and phonologically-cued semantic retrieval were assessed using the forward digit span test (F-DST) and word fluency test (WFT). To account for arousing, emotional and previous expertise effects, F-DST and WFT scores were measured only in non-musicians after listening to novel (unknown) excerpts of three different composers (Mozart, Vivaldi and Glass) and after silence, with individual preference for each condition subjectively rated. It was found that brief exposure to music had no beneficial effect on verbal WM, with even a transient impairment emerging after Vivaldi. In contrast, Vivaldi’s excerpt induced a marked enhancement of word fluency, but only in young adults, whereas listening to Mozart’s composition was followed by decreased WFT scores in the two age groups. These results show that depending on composer- or excerpt-specific music features, listening to music can selectively facilitate or inhibit ongoing verbal functions. It is suggested that these effects are mediated by pro-active priming or interference of residual activations induced by music in working memory loops.

Mozart Sharpens and Mahler Degrades the Word Memory Trace

“…Mozart also improved reading fluency in children (Yen-Ning et al, 2017). A comparison of Mozart, Vivaldi and Glass during a verbal memory task showed no significant effect on different age groups of adults, but a positive effect of Vivaldi's (but not Mozart's) music on verbal fluency could be observed in younger adults (Giannouli et al, 2019). Another problem is that the Mozart effect, or any other effect of uplifting music, is dependent on whether divided attention is necessary as with background music, or whether the music itself is associated with particular words as in music lyrics (Ferreri & Verga, 2016).…”

Neuroqueer(ing) Noise: Beyond ‘Mere Inclusion’ in a Neurodiverse Early Childhood Classroom

“…The effect was initially posited by Rauscher et al (1993) and its impact was limited to university-aged participants completing spatial awareness tasks while listening to the allegro con spirito of Mozart's sonata for two pianos in D major (KV 448). The effect has since been expanded to include a franchise of related effects, such as the 'Vivaldi effect' (Giannouli et al, 2018), the 'Philip Glass effect' (Rauscher et al, 1995), the deliciously named 'Blur effect' (Schellenberg & Hallam, 2006), and a 'raindrop sound-effects effect' (Proverbio et al, 2018). 4 Aside from the obvious colonial, white supremacist ideology underpinning some of these effects, each is an example of an instrumentalist approach, by which mainstream education values the arts only because they're serving the inclusion agenda: i.e.…”

Are there any links among psychopathological symptoms, musical preferences and verbal working memory in female adults?

“…Although cognition, and more specifically, verbal learning and memory are negatively influenced when severe psychopathological symptoms are present (Manglam & Das, 2013), the hypothesized link between psychopathological expression and music listening preferences has largely ignored the cognitive factor (as only cognitive styles have been investigated so far; Greenberg et al, 2015). In addition to that, listening to specific genres of music (e.g., classical music) is claimed to improve verbal memory encoding (Ferreri et al, 2013;Giannouli, 2017;Giannouli et al, 2018;Giannouli, Kargopoulos & Tsolaki, 2010), but the simultaneous influence of psychopathology and music preferences on cognition has not been investigated in detail so far.…”