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

Abstract

The question of the domain-general versus domain-specific nature of the serial order mechanisms involved in short-term memory is currently under debate. The present study aimed at addressing this question through the study of temporal grouping effects in short-term memory tasks with musical material, a domain which has received little interest so far. The goal was to determine whether positional coding—currently the best account of grouping effect in verbal short-term memory—represents a viable mechanism to explain grouping effects in the musical domain. In a first experiment, non-musicians performed serial reconstruction of 6-tone sequences, where half of the sequences was grouped by groups of three items and the other half presented at a regular pace. The overall data pattern suggests that temporal grouping exerts on tone sequences reconstruction the same effects as in the verbal domain, except for ordering errors which were not characterized by the typical increase of interpositions. This pattern has been replicated in two additional experiments with verbal material, using the same grouping structure as in the musical experiment. The findings support that verbal and musical short-term memory domains are characterized by similar temporal grouping effects for the recall of 6-item lists grouped by three, but it also suggests the existence of boundary condition to observe an increase of interposition errors predicted by positional theories.

Do developmental dyslexia and congenital amusia share underlying impairments?

“…In the present study, the impaired serial-order STM of DYS+A children was expressed independently of material (i.e., for words, pitches, and timbre), as revealed by the absence of interaction with this variable. This may support the argument that serial-order STM is governed by common processes in the verbal and musical domains, in line with previous studies that have shown similar hallmarks of serial-order effects in verbal and musical STM (Gorin et al, 2018; see also Gorin, 2021;Williamson, Baddeley, et al, 2010). One proposal is that music and language serial-order processing possibly rely on common sequential processes.…”