Auditory and visual short-term memory: influence of material type, contour, and musical expertise

Francesca Talamini,Olivier Houix,Massimo Grassi,Jérémie Ginzburg,Patrick Bouchet,Salomé Blain,Anne Caclin,Barbara Tillmann

doi:10.1007/s00426-021-01519-0

Abstract

Short-term memory has mostly been investigated with verbal or visuospatial stimuli and less so with other categories of stimuli. Moreover, the influence of sensory modality has been explored almost solely in the verbal domain. The present study compared visual and auditory short-term memory for different types of materials, aiming to understand whether sensory modality and material type can influence short-term memory performance. Furthermore, we aimed to assess if music expertise can modulate memory performance, as previous research has reported better auditory memory (and to some extent, visual memory), and better auditory contour recognition for musicians than non-musicians. To do so, we adapted the same recognition paradigm (delayed-matching to sample) across different types of stimuli. In each trial, participants (musicians and non-musicians) were presented with two sequences of events, separated by a silent delay, and had to indicate whether the two sequences were identical or different. The performance was compared for auditory and visual materials belonging to three different categories: (1) verbal (i.e., syllables); (2) nonverbal (i.e., that could not be easily denominated) with contour (based on loudness or luminance variations); and (3) nonverbal without contour (pink noise sequences or kanji letters sequences). Contour and no-contour conditions referred to whether the sequence can entail (or not) a contour (i.e., a pattern of up and down changes) based on non-pitch features. Results revealed a selective advantage of musicians for auditory no-contour stimuli and for contour stimuli (both visual and auditory), suggesting that musical expertise is associated with specific short-term memory advantages in domains close to the trained domain, also extending cross-modally when stimuli have contour information. Moreover, our results suggest a role of encoding strategies (i.e., how the material is represented mentally during the task) for short-term-memory performance.

Highlights

There are distinct functional systems for memory traces based on retention length (Cowan, 2008)
2 STMS ircam-CNRS-SU, 75004 Paris, France 3 Dipartimento di Psicologia Generale, Università degli Studi di Padova, Padua, Italy 4 Institute für Psychologie, Universität Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria for a short period of time, without manipulation of this information
We presented short-term memory recognition tasks to a group of highly-trained musicians and a group of non-musicians, with the aims of investigating (1) visual and auditory short-term memory for different categories of stimuli, both verbal and nonverbal, with and without contour information; (2) performance between musicians and nonmusicians, as musicians have previously shown a selective advantage over non-musicians in some short-term memory tasks; (3) two versions of the recognition task, with possibly different reliance on serial order and item memory

Summary

Introduction

There are distinct functional systems for memory traces based on retention length (Cowan, 2008). We focus on shortterm memory, that is the active maintenance of information. Austria for a short period of time, without manipulation of this information (maintenance with manipulation is classically defined as working memory, Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). Short-term memory has been usually investigated with tasks that first present a set of items, and participants have to either recall or recognize the previously presented information. Are there different processes and “storages” for different types of information and depending on the sensory modality (e.g., visual, auditory)?. Short-term memory has been mostly investigated for verbal stimuli (e.g., words, numbers, syllables) and visual stimuli (e.g., figures, spatial positions). The influential memory model of Baddeley and Hitch (1974) proposed three different components, with two temporary storages depending on

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