Temporal grouping effects in musical short-term memory

Abstract

Recent theoretical accounts of verbal and visuo-spatial short-term memory (STM) have proposed the existence of domain-general mechanisms for the maintenance of serial order information. These accounts are based on the observation of similar behavioural effects across several modalities, such as temporal grouping effects. Across two experiments, the present study aimed at extending these findings, by exploring a STM modality that has received little interest so far, STM for musical information. Given its inherent rhythmic, temporal and serial organisation, the musical domain is of interest for investigating serial order STM processes such as temporal grouping. In Experiment 1, the data did not allow to determine the presence or the absence of temporal grouping effects. In Experiment 2, we observed that temporal grouping of tone sequences during encoding improves short-term recognition for serially presented probe tones. Furthermore, the serial position curves included microprimacy and micro-recency effects, which are the hallmark characteristic of temporal grouping. Our results suggest that the encoding of serial order information in musical STM may be supported by temporal positional coding mechanisms similar to those reported in the verbal domain.Keywords: serial order, working memory, music and language, domain-general, rhythm IntroductionIn his influential paper, Lashley (1951) considered the capacity of the brain to process serial order information as one of the most complex types of human behaviour. This ability is involved in a wide range of human activities, such as speech perception (Grossberg, 2003) and production (Dell, 1986;Dell, Burger, & Svec, 1997;MacKay, 1970) and musical performance (Mathias, Pfordresher, & Palmer, 2015;Palmer & Pfordresher, 2003;Pfordresher, Palmer, & Jungers, 2007). Ironically, while Lashley (1951) illustrated the problem of serial order in behaviour with the case of serial order constraints that musicians have to deal with during musical performance, only little attention has been paid to serial order processing in the musical domain (but see . Serial ordering capacities have been extensively studied in the verbal domain, particularly in the context of verbal short-term memory (STM) tasks. In the verbal STM domain, a variable that has been observed to have a major impact on serial order processing is the effect of temporal grouping. The manipulation of the temporal grouping of memoranda has been shown to lead to generally improved recall accuracy relative to ungrouped memoranda and to a specific shape of the serial position curve characterised by intra-group primacy and recency effects (Farrell & Lewandowsky, 2004;Hartley, Hurlstone, & Hitch, 2016;Henson, 1996Henson, , 1999Hurlstone & Hitch, 2015;Ng & Maybery, 2002, 2005Parmentier, Andrés, Elford, & Jones, 2006;Parmentier, Maybery, & Jones, 2004;Ryan, 1969aRyan, , 1969b. The present study aimed at furthering our understanding of serial order STM for auditory material, by investigating the impact of temporal grouping manipulati...

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

“…Primacy and recency effects have been observed for STM recall or recognition of tone sequences (Gorin, Mengal, & Majerus, 2017;Greene & Samuel, 1986;Mondor & Morin, 2004). Also, there is some indication that in musical reproduction tasks, serial order transpositions may follow similar transposition gradients as is observed in verbal and visuospatial STM tasks (Mathias, Pfordresher, & Palmer, 2015).…”

Verbal and Musical Short-Term Memory: Evidence for Shared Serial Order Processes?

“…Based on the observed pattern of correlations between the different tasks, we decided to regroup the tasks as a function of verbal item, musical item, and domain-general serial order STM components (see the Results section for more details). Note that the formation of a domain-general order component is also supported by empirical evidence supporting the view that the processing of serial order information in verbal and musical domains of STM involves similar mechanisms (Gorin et al, 2016, 2018b, 2018a). The construction of the composite scores was based on a data-driven approach and was done in order to reduce the complexity of the subsequent set of regression analyses.…”

“…These tasks are characterized by patterns of serial order errors which are similar to those observed in verbal STM tasks (Mathias, Pfordresher, & Palmer, 2015), such as transposition gradients, and transposition errors involving items of distant serial positions but sharing the same metrical signature which resemble interposition errors observed in the verbal domain (Henson, 1996). Also, in studies conducted on non-musician participants, we recently showed that musical STM for serial order is characterized by similar ordering effects as those witnessed in verbal STM tasks (Gorin, Mengal, & Majerus, 2018b, 2018a), as well as a by a similar sensitivity to timing-based interference (Gorin et al, 2016). This raises the question of the existence of cross-modal serial order STM mechanisms.…”

“…We have described here preliminary evidence suggesting that the serial order processes subserving the functioning of verbal STM could be extended to the musical domain (Gorin et al, 2016, 2018b, 2018a). We also reported that the dissociation between item and order processing characterizing several recent models of verbal STM could also be characteristic of musical STM (Gorin et al, 2016).…”

Temporal grouping effects in verbal and musical short-term memory: Is serial order representation domain-general?

“…Several serial order effects considered as benchmark phenomena in the verbal STM domain (Hurlstone et al, 2014;Lewandowsky & Farrell, 2008) have also been observed in a recent series of musical STM experiments (Gorin, Kowialiewski, & Majerus, 2016;Gorin et al, 2018a;Gorin, Mengal, & Majerus, 2018b). The authors interpreted these results as evidence for the existence of domain-general processes to represent serial order information in the musical domain.…”