Do Musicians Have Better Short-Term Memory Than Nonmusicians? A Multilab Study

Studies with human and animal subjects have indicated age declines in short-term memory and cell loss in the cortex. Cell loss has been estamated by descriptive nonautomated methods. Declines in short-term memory may be related to reduced learning, movtivation, motor capacity, or some combination of these factors. Passive-avoidance tests of memory minimize these factors. Direct correlational studies on learning and memory in relation to cell loss in the same subject are not feasible in man and they have not been reported previously in animals. The aims of this study were to examine age differences in learning and short-term passive-avoidance memory in relation to cell packing density in the visual cortex of the Fisher 344 rat. Cell counts were made with a computer-guided, automated, image-analyzing system (TAS, Leitz). The following observations were made: (1) significant age differences in 2- and 6-hour short-term passive-avoidance retention or memory between mature and senescent rats were related to nonsignificant age differences in original learning inferred from starting latencies, running time and running distance and (2) sd compared to mature rats were associated with significant differences in neuron but not glia-vascular cell density in area 17 in the presence of nonsignificant age differences in cortical depth and brain weight. Aims of further studies are to establish the role of cell loss from the hippocampus in loss of short-term spatial memory with age and to develop criteria for differential counting of small neurons, glia, endothelial cells and pericytes.

Chapter 4 Developmental and individual differences in short-term memory

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.

An experiment was conducted to determine whether the individual differences in subjective organization that appear during free-recall memorization are due to individual differences in short-term memory or to individual differences in the ability to form and maintain interitem associations as had been suggested by Earhard (1967) and Earhard & Endicott (1969). Ss preselected as high and low subjective organizers, according to their performance during free recall, were tested for short-term memory by the task introduced by Peterson & Peterson (1959). The results indicated that high and low subjective organizers do not differ in short-term memory. These results were discussed in terms of the dichotomy between short-term and long-term memory processes.

BackgroundSeveral studies have found that musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks, but this is not always the case, and the strength of this apparent advantage is unknown. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis with the aim of clarifying whether musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks.MethodsEducation Source; PEP (WEB)—Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing; Psychology and Behavioral Science (EBSCO); PsycINFO (Ovid); PubMed; ScienceDirect—AllBooks Content (Elsevier API); SCOPUS (Elsevier API); SocINDEX with Full Text (EBSCO) and Google Scholar were searched for eligible studies. The selected studies involved two groups of participants: young adult musicians and nonmusicians. All the studies included memory tasks (loading long-term, short-term or working memory) that contained tonal, verbal or visuospatial stimuli. Three meta-analyses were run separately for long-term memory, short-term memory and working memory.ResultsWe collected 29 studies, including 53 memory tasks. The results showed that musicians performed better than nonmusicians in terms of long-term memory, g = .29, 95% CI (.08–.51), short-term memory, g = .57, 95% CI (.41–.73), and working memory, g = .56, 95% CI (.33–.80). To further explore the data, we included a moderator (the type of stimulus presented, i.e., tonal, verbal or visuospatial), which was found to influence the effect size for short-term and working memory, but not for long-term memory. In terms of short-term and working memory, the musicians’ advantage was large with tonal stimuli, moderate with verbal stimuli, and small or null with visuospatial stimuli.ConclusionsThe three meta-analyses revealed a small effect size for long-term memory, and a medium effect size for short-term and working memory, suggesting that musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks. Moreover, the effect of the moderator suggested that, the type of stimuli influences this advantage.

Short-term memory (STM) for signs in native signers consistently shows a smaller capacity than STM for words in native speakers (see Emmorey, 2002, for review). One explanation of this difference is based on the length effect: Short items yield higher spans than items that take longer to pronounce, presumably because of limited processing time. Signs in American Sign Language (ASL) take longer to articulate than English words (Bellugi & Fischer, 1972). This is not problematic in natural language use, because ASL conveys information simultaneously. However, with immediate serial recall, articulation time looms large. Some researchers have argued that articulation time is sufficient to account for the sign-speech difference in STM (Emmorey, 2002; Marschark & Mayer, 1998; Wilson, 2001; Wilson & Emmorey, 1997). If so, then STM capacity is, at its root, governed by a general processing limitation that is not affected by language modality. However, this claim has never been adequately tested. If articulation time does not fully account for the sign-speech difference in STM, then other differences between sign and speech may be important. In particular, because vision and audition have strikingly different information-processing characteristics, the sign-speech difference could be due to perceptually based coding. If so, then the principles governing STM are locally determined and cannot be generalized across language modalities. Recently Boutla, Supalla, Newport, and Bavelier (2004) addressed this question using stimuli that are articulated very rapidly in ASL. The digits 1 through 9 and the letters of the fingerspelling alphabet in ASL are produced with the fingers of one hand without large-scale movement, and therefore can be produced very quickly. However, the hand shapes for the digits 1 through 9 in ASL are similar, and formational similarity reduces STM (Klima & Bellugi, 1979; Wilson & Emmorey, 1997). Therefore, Boutla et al. used the Digit Span task from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), but substituted ASL letters for digits. Signers were tested with ASL letters, and speakers with spoken English digits. Span was still longer for English than ASL. The authors concluded that STM for spoken language benefits from auditory-based representations and does not reflect a standard capacity of STM that applies across domains. However, that study compared signed letters with spoken digits, and recent evidence suggests that digits have a special status in STM, yielding better performance than otherwise matched lexical items (Jeffries, Patterson, Jones, Bateman, & Ralph, 2004). Thus, digits and letters may not be comparable categories for testing STM. A better option, then, would be to compare ASL letters with English letters. We report here the results of three experiments. The first two verified that digits yield better STM than letters. The third experiment returned to the original question: whether superiority of spoken language in STMpersists when articulatory duration is controlled. We used theWAIS Digit Span task (Wechsler, 1955), in which sequences of items are presented at a rate of one per second and must be repeated by the participant in the correct order. Sequences increase in length, with two sequences of each length, and the test concludes when the participant fails on both sequences of a particular length. One point is awarded for every correct sequence.

Background: Inadequate chronic nutrition can cause disruption of bone growth and brain development. Impaired bone growth can cause stunting in children, and a disruption of brain development will affect cognitive function, one of them is short-term memory. This study aimed to compare the short-term memory between stunting and non stunting in urban and rural elementary school students in Kupang.Methods: This research used analytic observational method with cross sectional design conducted on urban and rural elementary school students in Kupang City. One hundred and sixty students who met the inclusion and exclusion criteria were selected using consecutive sampling method. Characteristics data were collected by the interview, while the stunting data was known by measuring height and assessed by WHO anthroplus application, short-term memory data was obtained from digit span test. Stunting is a nominal data scale, while the short-term memory is an ordinal data scale. This study was analyzed bivariately using chi-square test with significant p value ≤ 0.05.Results: Chi-square test results of short-term memory between stunting and non stunting in urban and rural elementary school students obtained p = 0.144, which means there is no significant difference in short-term memory between stunting and non stunting in urban and rural elementary school children in Kupang.Conclusions: There is no significant difference in short-term memory between stunting and non stunting in elementary school children, both in urban and rural areas of Kupang.

Individual Differences in Short-Term Memory

The sources of age differences in short-term memory for spatial locations were explored in 2 experiments that examined factors related to input, to maintenance, and to output. In each experiment, 4 dots were presented briefly, followed after a retention interval by a probe dot, which was judged to either match or not match one of the 4 memory-set dots. Results showed that poorer performance by older adults could be attributed independently to reduced visual acuity, to less effective use of rehearsal strategies, and to differences in response biases.

Metabolic rate determines life processes and the physiological requirements of an individual, and has recently been implicated as a driver of inter-individual variation in behaviour, with positive correlations associated with boldness, exploration and aggressive behaviours being recorded. While the link between metabolism and personality has been explored, little is known about the influence of metabolism on cognitive abilities. Here we used juvenile female chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) to investigate the relationships between metabolic rate at rest, short-term memory, personality, and dominance. Resting metabolic rates of the chicks were measured over a three-week period, concurrently with measures of short-term memory using an analogue of the radial arm maze. We also measured latency to leave the shelter (boldness), neophobia (fear of novel objects) and dominance within a group, both before and after short-term memory trials. We found that metabolic rate did not explain inter-individual differences in short-term memory, personality traits or dominance, suggesting that energy allocated to these traits is independent of individual metabolic rate, and providing evidence for the independent energy-management hypothesis. Differences in short-term memory were also not explained by boldness or neophobia. Variation in behaviour in chicks, therefore, appears to be driven by separate, currently unknown variables.

Some researchers theorize that musicians’ greater language ability is mediated by greater working memory because music and language share the same processing resources. Prior work using working memory sentence processing dual-task paradigms have shown that holding verbal information (e.g., words) in working memory interferes with sentence processing. In contrast, visuospatial stimuli are processed in a different working memory store and should not interfere with sentence processing. We tested whether music showed similar interference to sentence processing as opposed to noninterference like visuospatial stimuli. We also compared musicians to nonmusicians to investigate whether musical training improves verbal working memory. Findings revealed that musical stimuli produced similar working memory interference as linguistic stimuli, but visuospatial stimuli did not—suggesting that music and language rely on similar working memory resources (i.e., verbal skills) that are distinct from visuospatial skills. Musicians performed more accurately on the working memory tasks, particularly for the verbal and musical working memory stimuli, supporting an association between musicianship and greater verbal working memory capacity. Future research is necessary to evaluate the role of music training as a cognitive intervention or educational strategy to enhance reading fluency.

Reception and Retention Factors in Tone Duration Discriminations by Brain-Damaged and Control Patients

The impact of amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) on short-term memory (STM) and learning performance assessed with different memory modalities was unknown. This study examined differences in STM and learning ability between verbal and visuospatial memory-modalities in older adults with aMCI. Thirty-nine aMCI subjects (71.5 ± 6.0 yrs) and 33 non-MCI (control) subjects (71.1 ± 5.7 yrs) of similar age and educational attainment consented to participate in the study. Short-term memory was assessed using Digit-Span-Test (DST), California-Verbal-Learning-Test-2nd edition - short-form (CVLT-II), and Brief-Visuospatial-Memory-Test-Revised (BVMT-R); CVLT-II and BVMT-R assessed verbal-and visuospatial-learning, respectively. DST-Backward (p = 0.016) and DST-Sequencing (p < 0.001) scores were significantly lower in the aMCI vs. control subjects (Student's t-test), but DST-Forward scores did not differ (p = 0.237). Immediate and delayed free-recall scores in both CVLT-II (p < 0.001) and BVMT-R (p < 0.001) were lower in the aMCI subjects. The immediate free-recall scores in both tests improved with repeated trials (two-factor ANOVA: p < 0.001 for trial factor) to similar extents in the aMCI and control groups with no significant interaction of the trial and group factors (p = 0.266 in CVLT-II and p = 0.239 in BVMT-R). Amnestic MCI subjects have diminished STM but intact learning ability. Differences in STM of older adults with vs. without aMCI are more readily distinguished by word-verbal memory and/or visuospatial memory testing than digit-verbal memory testing.

Background : Long-term insufficient nutritional needs will directly impact on the development and maturation of brain function. Disruption of development and maturation process in the brain is associated with decreased cognitive abilities. Frequently, the effect of long-term nutritional insufficiency has also height deficits called stunting.This study aimed to compare the short-term memory between stunted and non-stunted groups. Methods : A comparative study was conducted on 30 children in a non stunted group and 30 children in a stunted group. Children in both groups were selected from one of the elementary schools in Jatinangor using the simple random sampling method toward 3–5 for grade and 8–10 for age groups. The measurement of memory aspects for short-term memory used the Digit Span Test (forward and backward) and Simbol Modality Test. Results : The collected data were in normal and not normal distribution because the statistical test used the independent-t test and Mann-Whitney. The mean memory score comparison between group 1 and group 2 on Digit Span Test Forward was 5.33:5.33 (p=0.994), Digit Span test Backward was 2.73:2.60 (p=0.440), and Symbol Modality Test was 20.90:19.60 (p=0.347). Conclusions : There is no significant difference in short-term memory between stunted and non–stunted groups, due to some confounding factors such as, environmental aspect, parent’s education level, socioeconomic, and genetic factors.

Short-Term Memory in Signed Languages: Not Just a Disadvantage for Serial Recall