Working memory and musical competence of musicians and non-musicians

Hansen, Mads; Wallentin, Mikkel; Vuust, Peter

doi:10.1177/0305735612452186

Cited by 98 publications

(113 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Concerning musical STM, our results are in line with previous studies reporting that musicians have better abilities to keep in memory pitch information (Berti, Münzer, Schröger, & Pechmann, 2006;Pechmann & Mohr, 1992) and to recall and recognize the serial order of tone sequences (Schulze et al, 2012;. Other studies observed that this advantage also extends to the verbal domain (Chan, Ho, & Cheung, 1998;Franklin et al, 2008;Hansen, Wallentin, & Vuust, 2013;Y. Lee, Lu, & Ko, 2007;e.g., Parbery-Clark, Skoe, Lam, & Kraus, 2009).…”

supporting

confidence: 92%

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

2017

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supporting

confidence: 92%

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

2017

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“…In general, musicians show superior online temporal monitoring (Rammsayer & Altenmüller, 2006), even when the presentation is visual (Rammsayer, Buttkus, & Altenmüller, 2012). They also have higher WM spans than novices for auditory, and especially for tonal, material (Benassi-Werke, Queiroz, Araújo, Bueno, & Oliveira, 2012;Schulze, Zysset, Mueller, Friederici, & Koelsch, 2011;Williamson et al, 2010), although not necessarily for nontemporal tasks such as spatial WM (Hansen, Wallentin, & Vuust, 2013). As we mentioned above, although we cannot exclude preexisting propensity as a factor in these superior skills, early-trained individuals show larger expertise effects than do late-trained individuals do, suggesting at least some direct influence of years of training (Bailey & Penhune, 2010).…”

mentioning

confidence: 75%

Attentional flexibility and memory capacity in conductors and pianists

Wöllner

Halpern

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Individuals with high working memory (WM) capacity also tend to have better selective and divided attention. Although both capacities are essential for skilled performance in many areas, evidence for potential training and expertise effects is scarce. We investigated the attentional flexibility of musical conductors by comparing them to equivalently trained pianists. Conductors must focus their attention both on individual instruments and on larger sections of different instruments. We studied students and professionals in both domains to assess the contributions of age and training to these skills. Participants completed WM span tests for auditory and visual (notated) pitches and timing durations, as well as long-term memory tests. In three dichotic attention tasks, they were asked to detect small pitch and timing deviations from two melodic streams presented in baseline (separate streams), selective-attention (concentrating on only one stream), and divided-attention (concentrating on targets in both streams simultaneously) conditions. Conductors were better than pianists in detecting timing deviations in divided attention, and experts detected more targets than students. We found no group differences for WM capacity or for pitch deviations in the attention tasks, even after controlling for the older age of the experts. Musicians' WM spans across multimodal conditions were positively related to selective and divided attention. High-WM participants also had shorter reaction times in selective attention. Taken together, conductors showed higher attentional flexibility in successfully switching between different foci of attention.Keywords Selective and divided attention . Working memory . Long-term memory . Multimodal . Expertise . Cognitive aging Auditory processing, by its nature, requires considerable investment of executive resources. Auditory information is evanescent and can vary rapidly over short time intervals. Thus, both attending to the signal and buffering of information in the auditory stream are vital to comprehending everything from speech to birdsong to music. In this investigation, we examined the attentional and working memory (WM) capacities, and the relation between them, in a profession that should demand the highest level of auditory executive capacity: musical conductors.Several kinds of attention are essential to parse the auditory world. Considering first selective attention, Fritz, Elhilali, David, and Shamma (2007) observed that in everyday situations we constantly must extract features such as harmonicity, intensity, duration, and rhythm in order to group, identify, and locate auditory objects, even above and beyond the challenge of following one conversation among many, as in the "cocktail party problem" (Cherry, 1953). In other words, we need proficiency at auditory scene analysis (Bregman, 1990;Fritz et al., 2007). We normally accomplish this analysis quite well with both top-down and bottom-up control processes-by, for instance, increasing activity in relevant and decreasin...

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“…Drawing conclusions from this past work is difficult not only because of the variety of EF components examined, but also the variety of tasks used to measure EF and the variety of criteria used to categorize participants as "musicians" or "nonmusicians". In addition, it is not yet clear if musicians show advantages only in the auditory modality (e.g., Hansen et al, 2013;Strait et al, 2010;cf. Carey et al, 2015) or if musical ability is related to performance on non-auditory EF tasks as well (e.g., Bialystok & DePape, 2009;Oechslin et al, 2013).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Relatedly, the modality-specificity or generality of these effects remains unclear. While some work suggests that musician advantages in EF (and other cognitive abilities) may be limited to auditory tasks (e.g., Hansen, Wallentin, & Vuust, 2013;Strait et al, 2010;Strait, O'Connell, Parbery-Clark, & Kraus, 2014;cf. Carey et al, 2015), other studies find effects in the visual modality as well (e.g., Bialystok & DePape, 2009;Oechslin et al, 2013), but there have been few investigations using comparable auditory and visual EF tasks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tuning the mind: Exploring the connections between musical ability and executive functions

et al. 2016

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A growing body of research suggests that musical experience and ability are related to a variety of cognitive abilities, including executive functioning (EF). However, it is not yet clear if these relationships are limited to specific components of EF, limited to auditory tasks, or reflect very general cognitive advantages. This study investigated the existence and generality of the relationship between musical ability and EFs by evaluating the musical experience and ability of a large group of participants and investigating whether this predicts individual differences on three different components of EF – inhibition, updating, and switching – in both auditory and visual modalities. Musical ability predicted better performance on both auditory and visual updating tasks, even when controlling for a variety of potential confounds (age, handedness, bilingualism, and socio-economic status). However, musical ability was not clearly related to inhibitory control and was unrelated to switching performance. These data thus show that cognitive advantages associated with musical ability are not limited to auditory processes, but are limited to specific aspects of EF. This supports a process-specific (but modality-general) relationship between musical ability and non-musical aspects of cognition.GRAMMY Foundatio

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Working memory and musical competence of musicians and non-musicians

Cited by 98 publications

References 37 publications

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

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

Attentional flexibility and memory capacity in conductors and pianists

Tuning the mind: Exploring the connections between musical ability and executive functions

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