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Sauvé SA, Satkunarajah P, Cooke S, Demirkaplan Ö, Follett A, Zendel BR. Age and familiarity effects on musical memory. PLoS One 2024; 19:e0305969. [PMID: 39046950 PMCID: PMC11268704 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0305969] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/27/2023] [Accepted: 06/08/2024] [Indexed: 07/27/2024] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND A common complaint in older adults is trouble with their memory, especially for new information. Current knowledge about normal aging and changes in memory identify a divide between memory tasks that are unaffected by aging and those that are. Among the unaffected are recognition tasks. These memory tasks rely on accessing well-known information, often include environmental support, and tend to be automatic. Negative age effects on memory are often observed at both encoding and during recall. Older adults often have difficulty with recall tasks, particularly those that require effortful self-initiated processing, episodic memory, and retention of information about contextual cues. Research in memory for music in healthy aging suggests a skill-invariance hypothesis: that age effects dominate when general-purpose cognitive mechanisms are needed to perform the musical task at hand, while experience effects dominate when music-specific knowledge is needed to perform the task [1]. AIMS The goals of this pair of studies were to investigate the effects of age and familiarity on musical memory in the context of real pieces of music, and to compare a live concert experimental setting with a lab-based experimental setting. METHOD Participants' task was to click a button (or press the spacebar) when they heard the target theme in three pieces of music. One was Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and the others were original pieces commissioned for this study, one tonal and one atonal. Participants heard the relevant theme three times before listening to a piece of music. The music was performed by the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra; participants either attended the concert, or watched a recording of the concert in the lab. Participants also completed two short cognitive tests and filled out a questionnaire collecting demographic information and a hearing abilities self-assessment. RESULTS We find a significant effect of familiarity and setting but not of age or musical training on recognition performance as measured by d'. More specifically, performance is best for the familiar, tonal piece, moderate for the unfamiliar tonal piece and worst for the unfamiliar atonal piece. Performance was better in the live setting than the lab setting. CONCLUSIONS The absence of an age effect provides encouraging evidence that music's diverse cues may encourage cognitive scaffolding, in turn improving encoding and subsequent recognition. Better performance in an ecological versus lab setting supports the expansion of ecological studies in the field.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sarah A. Sauvé
- Division of Community Health and Humanities, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada
- School of Psychology, College of Health and Science, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom
| | - Praveena Satkunarajah
- Division of Community Health and Humanities, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada
| | - Stephen Cooke
- Division of Community Health and Humanities, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada
| | - Özgen Demirkaplan
- Division of Community Health and Humanities, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada
| | - Alicia Follett
- Division of Community Health and Humanities, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada
| | - Benjamin Rich Zendel
- Division of Community Health and Humanities, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada
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Lippolis M, Müllensiefen D, Frieler K, Matarrelli B, Vuust P, Cassibba R, Brattico E. Learning to play a musical instrument in the middle school is associated with superior audiovisual working memory and fluid intelligence: A cross-sectional behavioral study. Front Psychol 2022; 13:982704. [PMID: 36312139 PMCID: PMC9610841 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.982704] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/30/2022] [Accepted: 09/22/2022] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Music training, in all its forms, is known to have an impact on behavior both in childhood and even in aging. In the delicate life period of transition from childhood to adulthood, music training might have a special role for behavioral and cognitive maturation. Among the several kinds of music training programs implemented in the educational communities, we focused on instrumental training incorporated in the public middle school curriculum in Italy that includes both individual, group and collective (orchestral) lessons several times a week. At three middle schools, we tested 285 preadolescent children (aged 10–14 years) with a test and questionnaire battery including adaptive tests for visuo-spatial working memory skills (with the Jack and Jill test), fluid intelligence (with a matrix reasoning test) and music-related perceptual and memory abilities (with listening tests). Of these children, 163 belonged to a music curriculum within the school and 122 to a standard curriculum. Significant differences between students of the music and standard curricula were found in both perceptual and cognitive domains, even when controlling for pre-existing individual differences in musical sophistication. The music children attending the third and last grade of middle school had better performance and showed the largest advantage compared to the control group on both audiovisual working memory and fluid intelligence. Furthermore, some gender differences were found for several tests and across groups in favor of females. The present results indicate that learning to play a musical instrument as part of the middle school curriculum represents a resource for preadolescent education. Even though the current evidence is not sufficient to establish the causality of the found effects, it can still guide future research evaluation with longitudinal data.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mariangela Lippolis
- Department of Teaching of Musical, Visual and Corporal Expression, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain
- Mariangela Lippolis,
| | - Daniel Müllensiefen
- Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, United Kingdom
| | - Klaus Frieler
- Department of Methodology, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, Germany
| | - Benedetta Matarrelli
- Department of Clinical Medicine, Center for Music in the Brain (MIB), The Royal Academy of Music Aarhus and Aalborg, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
- Department of Education, Psychology, and Communication, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy
| | - Peter Vuust
- Department of Clinical Medicine, Center for Music in the Brain (MIB), The Royal Academy of Music Aarhus and Aalborg, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
| | - Rosalinda Cassibba
- Department of Education, Psychology, and Communication, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy
| | - Elvira Brattico
- Department of Clinical Medicine, Center for Music in the Brain (MIB), The Royal Academy of Music Aarhus and Aalborg, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
- Department of Education, Psychology, and Communication, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy
- *Correspondence: Elvira Brattico,
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Shared cognitive resources between memory and attention during sound-sequence encoding. Atten Percept Psychophys 2022; 84:739-759. [PMID: 35106682 DOI: 10.3758/s13414-021-02390-2] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 10/02/2021] [Indexed: 11/08/2022]
Abstract
You are on the phone, walking down a street. This daily situation calls for selective attention, allowing you to ignore surrounding irrelevant sounds, while trying to encode in memory the relevant information from the phone. Attention and memory are indeed two cognitive functions that are interacting constantly. However, their interaction is not yet well characterized during sound-sequence encoding. We independently manipulated both selective attention and working memory in a delayed-matching-to-sample of two tone-series, played successively in one ear. During the first melody presentation (memory encoding), weakly or highly distracting melodies were played in the other ear. Detection of the difference between the two comparison melodies could be easy or difficult, requiring low- or high-precision encoding, i.e., low or high memory load. Sixteen non-musician and 16 musician participants performed this new task. As expected, both groups of participants were less accurate in the difficult memory task and in difficult-to-ignore distractor conditions. Importantly, an interaction between memory-task difficulty and distractor difficulty was found in both groups. Non-musicians presented less difference between easy and difficult-to-ignore distractors in the difficult than in the easy memory task. On the contrary, musicians, with better performance than non-musicians, showed a greater difference between easy and difficult-to-ignore distractors in the difficult than in the easy memory task. In a second experiment including trials without a distractor, we could show that these effects are in line with the cognitive load theory. Taken together, these results speak for shared cognitive resources between working memory and attention during sound-sequence encoding.
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Lad M, Billig AJ, Kumar S, Griffiths TD. A specific relationship between musical sophistication and auditory working memory. Sci Rep 2022; 12:3517. [PMID: 35241747 PMCID: PMC8894429 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-07568-8] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/02/2021] [Accepted: 02/22/2022] [Indexed: 11/08/2022] Open
Abstract
Previous studies have found conflicting results between individual measures related to music and fundamental aspects of auditory perception and cognition. The results have been difficult to compare because of different musical measures being used and lack of uniformity in the auditory perceptual and cognitive measures. In this study we used a general construct of musicianship, musical sophistication, that can be applied to populations with widely different backgrounds. We investigated the relationship between musical sophistication and measures of perception and working memory for sound by using a task suitable to measure both. We related scores from the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index to performance on tests of perception and working memory for two acoustic features-frequency and amplitude modulation. The data show that musical sophistication scores are best related to working memory for frequency in an analysis that accounts for age and non-verbal intelligence. Musical sophistication was not significantly associated with working memory for amplitude modulation rate or with the perception of either acoustic feature. The work supports a specific association between musical sophistication and working memory for sound frequency.
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Affiliation(s)
- Meher Lad
- Translational and Clinical Research Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
| | | | | | - Timothy D Griffiths
- Human Brain Research Laboratory, University of Iowa, Iowa, USA
- Biosciences Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
- Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London, London, UK
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Yurgil KA, Velasquez MA, Winston JL, Reichman NB, Colombo PJ. Music Training, Working Memory, and Neural Oscillations: A Review. Front Psychol 2020; 11:266. [PMID: 32153474 PMCID: PMC7047970 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00266] [Citation(s) in RCA: 11] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/13/2019] [Accepted: 02/04/2020] [Indexed: 12/18/2022] Open
Abstract
This review focuses on reports that link music training to working memory and neural oscillations. Music training is increasingly associated with improvement in working memory, which is strongly related to both localized and distributed patterns of neural oscillations. Importantly, there is a small but growing number of reports of relationships between music training, working memory, and neural oscillations in adults. Taken together, these studies make important contributions to our understanding of the neural mechanisms that support effects of music training on behavioral measures of executive functions. In addition, they reveal gaps in our knowledge that hold promise for further investigation. The current review is divided into the main sections that follow: (1) discussion of behavioral measures of working memory, and effects of music training on working memory in adults; (2) relationships between music training and neural oscillations during temporal stages of working memory; (3) relationships between music training and working memory in children; (4) relationships between music training and working memory in older adults; and (5) effects of entrainment of neural oscillations on cognitive processing. We conclude that the study of neural oscillations is proving useful in elucidating the neural mechanisms of relationships between music training and the temporal stages of working memory. Moreover, a lifespan approach to these studies will likely reveal strategies to improve and maintain executive function during development and aging.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kate A. Yurgil
- Department of Psychological Sciences, Loyola University, New Orleans, LA, United States
| | | | - Jenna L. Winston
- Department of Psychology, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, United States
| | - Noah B. Reichman
- Brain Institute, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, United States
| | - Paul J. Colombo
- Department of Psychology, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, United States
- Brain Institute, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, United States
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Saarikivi KA, Huotilainen M, Tervaniemi M, Putkinen V. Selectively Enhanced Development of Working Memory in Musically Trained Children and Adolescents. Front Integr Neurosci 2019; 13:62. [PMID: 31780907 PMCID: PMC6851266 DOI: 10.3389/fnint.2019.00062] [Citation(s) in RCA: 13] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/17/2019] [Accepted: 10/07/2019] [Indexed: 11/17/2022] Open
Abstract
In the current longitudinal study, we investigated the development of working memory in musically trained and nontrained children and adolescents, aged 9-20. We measured working memory with the Digit Span (DS) forwards and backwards tests (N = 106) and the Trail-Making A and B (TMT-A and B; N = 104) tests three times, in 2011, 2013, and 2016. We expected that musically trained participants would outperform peers with no musical training. Indeed, we found that the younger musically trained participants, in particular, outperformed their nontrained peers in the TMT-A, TMT-B and DS forwards tests. These tests all primarily require active maintenance of a rule in memory or immediate recall. In contrast, we found no group differences in the backwards test that requires manipulation and updating of information in working memory. These results suggest that musical training is more strongly associated with heightened working memory capacity and maintenance than enhanced working memory updating, especially in late childhood and early adolescence.
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Affiliation(s)
- Katri Annukka Saarikivi
- Cognitive Brain Research Unit, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
- Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Medicum, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
| | - Minna Huotilainen
- Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Medicum, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
- Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
| | - Mari Tervaniemi
- Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Medicum, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
- CICERO Learning, Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
| | - Vesa Putkinen
- Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Medicum, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
- Turku PET Centre, Turku, Finland
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