Musicians’ memory for verbal and tonal materials under conditions of irrelevant sound

Williamson, Victoria J.; Mitchell, Tom; Hitch, Graham J.; Baddeley, Alan

doi:10.1177/0305735609351918

Cited by 13 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 55 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…At the same time, there clearly remains an effect of expertise, performance for the vSTM tasks remaining higher than performance for the mSTM tasks in our non-musician participants. In order to equate performance levels across domains, we could have used longer list lengths for the vSTM tasks relative to the mSTM tasks, as previously done by Williamson et al [91]. This procedure however also has an important disadvantage as it will lead to an imbalance in terms of number of serial positions to be probed and number of trials between stimulus domains.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domain-Generality of Timing-Based Serial Order Processes in Short-Term Memory: New Insights from Musical and Verbal Domains

2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Several models in the verbal domain of short-term memory (STM) consider a dissociation between item and order processing. This view is supported by data demonstrating that different types of time-based interference have a greater effect on memory for the order of to-be-remembered items than on memory for the items themselves. The present study investigated the domain-generality of the item versus serial order dissociation by comparing the differential effects of time-based interfering tasks, such as rhythmic interference and articulatory suppression, on item and order processing in verbal and musical STM domains. In Experiment 1, participants had to maintain sequences of verbal or musical information in STM, followed by a probe sequence, this under different conditions of interference (no-interference, rhythmic interference, articulatory suppression). They were required to decide whether all items of the probe list matched those of the memory list (item condition) or whether the order of the items in the probe sequence matched the order in the memory list (order condition). In Experiment 2, participants performed a serial order probe recognition task for verbal and musical sequences ensuring sequential maintenance processes, under no-interference or rhythmic interference conditions. For Experiment 1, serial order recognition was not significantly more impacted by interfering tasks than was item recognition, this for both verbal and musical domains. For Experiment 2, we observed selective interference of the rhythmic interference condition on both musical and verbal order STM tasks. Overall, the results suggest a similar and selective sensitivity to time-based interference for serial order STM in verbal and musical domains, but only when the STM tasks ensure sequential maintenance processes.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domain-Generality of Timing-Based Serial Order Processes in Short-Term Memory: New Insights from Musical and Verbal Domains

2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Participants were administered tone lists of increasing length (from three to six items) with four different trials per length condition. The administration of shorter sequences for the musical STM task, as compared to the verbal serial order reconstruction task, was motivated by the fact that STM capacities are overall lower for musical than for verbal stimuli, and this particularly true in nonmusician participants (Gorin, Kowialiewski, & Majerus, 2016;Schendel & Palmer, 2007;Schulze, Mueller, & Koelsch, 2011;Williamson, Mitchell, Hitch, & Baddeley, 2010). In order to ensure the familiarization with task requirements, participants were provided with three practice trials before starting the task.…”

Section: Design and Procedurementioning

confidence: 99%

A comparison of serial order short-term memory effects across verbal and musical domains

2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…sequences, such as Logie and Edworthy (1986) and Williamson, Mitchell, Hitch, and Baddeley (2010). Studies investigating factors that influence tone recognition usually focus on the question of whether verbal and tone material may (or may not) have some underlying common processing mechanism.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Musicians' Working Memory for Tones, Words, and Pseudowords

Benassi-Werke

Queiroz²,

Araujo³

et al. 2012

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Studies investigating factors that influence tone recognition generally use recognition tests, whereas the majority of the studies on verbal material use self-generated responses in the form of serial recall tests. In the present study we intended to investigate whether tonal and verbal materials share the same cognitive mechanisms, by presenting an experimental instrument that evaluates short-term and working memories for tones, using self-generated sung responses that may be compared to verbal tests. This paradigm was designed according to the same structure of the forward and backward digit span tests, but using digits, pseudowords, and tones as stimuli. The profile of amateur singers and professional singers in these tests was compared in forward and backward digit, pseudoword, tone, and contour spans. In addition, an absolute pitch experimental group was included, in order to observe the possible use of verbal labels in tone memorization tasks. In general, we observed that musical schooling has a slight positive influence on the recall of tones, as opposed to verbal material, which is not influenced by musical schooling. Furthermore, the ability to reproduce melodic contours (up and down patterns) is generally higher than the ability to reproduce exact tone sequences. However, backward spans were lower than forward spans for all stimuli (digits, pseudowords, tones, contour). Curiously, backward spans were disproportionately lower for tones than for verbal material-that is, the requirement to recall sequences in backward rather than forward order seems to differentially affect tonal stimuli. This difference does not vary according to musical expertise.

show abstract

Musicians’ memory for verbal and tonal materials under conditions of irrelevant sound

Cited by 13 publications

References 55 publications

Domain-Generality of Timing-Based Serial Order Processes in Short-Term Memory: New Insights from Musical and Verbal Domains

Domain-Generality of Timing-Based Serial Order Processes in Short-Term Memory: New Insights from Musical and Verbal Domains

A comparison of serial order short-term memory effects across verbal and musical domains

Musicians' Working Memory for Tones, Words, and Pseudowords

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About