Musicians have better memory than nonmusicians: A meta-analysis

Abstract

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.

Musical and verbal short‐term memory: insights from neurodevelopmental and neurological disorders

“…33 A meta-analysis of studies comparing STM and WM (as well as LTM) in musicians and nonmusicians was recently performed. 34 It confirmed that musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks. For STM and WM, this expertise effect was large for tonal stimuli, moderate for verbal stimuli, and small or null for visuospatial stimuli.…”

“…A meta‐analysis of studies comparing STM and WM (as well as LTM) in musicians and nonmusicians was recently performed . It confirmed that musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks.…”

Uso de la música para modular la memoria: Una revisión sistemática

“…Niños con entrenamiento musical vs Niños control; Adultos músicos vs Adultos control Memoria de trabajo visual y verbañ Niños con entrenamiento musical > Niños control; Adultos músicos > Adultos control Franklin et al, (2008 Los resultados de los estudios longitudinales en niños (Hannon & Trainor, 2007;Schellenberg, 2004;Roden, Kreuts, & Bongard, 2012) y adultos (Elmer & Jäncke, 2018;Habib & Besson, 2009;Zuk, Benjamin, Kenyon, & Gaab, 2014), indican que la práctica y el aprendizaje musical conducen a un amplio fenómeno de plasticidad cerebral, afectando el rendimiento cognitivo (Talamini, Altoè, Carretti, & Grassi, 2018). Específicamente en relación a la memoria, existen controversias en los resultados obtenidos dependiendo del tipo de memoria, la forma de medirla y las características de la muestra.…”

Spans attributed to short-term memory are explained by sensitivity to long-term statistics in both musicians and individuals with dyslexia

“…It has been previously suggested that musicians' enhanced STM might rely on enhanced general chunking skills, which are developed as part of the musical training (Talamini, Altoè, Carretti, & Grassi, 2017). However, the generalization of musical training to enhanced chunking ability of untrained items is conceptually questionable given the specificity of benefits from training (Jakoby, Raviv, Jaffe-Dax, Lieder, & Ahissar, 2019).…”