An fMRI investigation of the cultural specificity of music memory

Abstract

This study explored the role of culture in shaping music perception and memory. We tested the hypothesis that listeners demonstrate different patterns of activation associated with music processing-particularly right frontal cortex-when encoding and retrieving culturally familiar and unfamiliar stimuli, with the latter evoking broader activation consistent with more complex memory tasks. Subjects (n = 16) were right-handed adults born and raised in the USA (n = 8) or Turkey (n = 8) with minimal music training. Using fMRI procedures, we scanned subjects during two tasks: (i) listening to novel musical examples from their own culture and an unfamiliar culture and (ii) identifying which among a series of brief excerpts were taken from the longer examples. Both groups were more successful remembering music of their home culture. We found greater activation for culturally unfamiliar music listening in the left cerebellar region, right angular gyrus, posterior precuneus and right middle frontal area extending into the inferior frontal cortex. Subjects demonstrated greater activation in the cingulate gyrus and right lingual gyrus when engaged in recall of culturally unfamiliar music. This study provides evidence for the influence of culture on music perception and memory performance at both a behavioral and neurological level.

Remembering the melody and timbre, forgetting the key and tempo

“…In another study that used unfamiliar but Western-sounding melodies, memory faded over time but was still above chance levels after 1 month (Peretz et al, 1998). Although listeners with limited music training lack explicit knowledge of mode or meter, their implicit knowledge of Western tonal and metrical structures would have facilitated perception (e.g., Hannon & Trehub, 2005;Lynch, Eilers, Oller, & Urbano, 1990;Trehub & Hannon, 2009) and memory (Demorest, Morrison, Beken, & Jungbluth, 2008;Demorest et al, 2010;Wong, Roy, & Margulis, 2009) in the present study. Had the melodies been atonal, nonmetrical, and/or drawn from a foreign musical system (e.g., Balinese, Balkan, Indian), recognition would have been much more difficult, and it is unknown whether changes in surface features would have a detrimental effect similar to the ones that we observed.…”

The functional neuroanatomy of musical memory in Alzheimer's disease

“…Involvement of anterior temporal cortex is consistent with the key integrative function of this region in other domains of semantic knowledge and previous evidence that anterior temporal degeneration is associated with impaired recognition of familiar music ( Hsieh et al., 2011 , Golden, Downey et al, 2015 ). Inferior and dorso-medial prefrontal regions may be engaged in anticipating syntactical structure in familiar music and implicitly preparing motor responses ( Demorest et al., 2010 , Pereira et al., 2011 ). The healthy control group showed activation of right precuneus by previously unfamiliar melodies: this response was lost in the patient groups, consistent with the targeting by AD pathology of hippocampus and linked temporo-parietal circuits that decode musical novelty ( Herdener et al., 2010 , Demorest et al., 2010 , Kafkas and Montaldi, 2014 ).…”

Statistical learning and probabilistic prediction in music cognition: mechanisms of stylistic enculturation

“…Demorest and Morrison capture the effects of the SLH in their cultural distance hypothesis: "the degree to which the musics of any two cultures differ in the statistical patterns of pitch and rhythm will predict how well a person from one of the cultures can process the music of the other." 138 While crosscultural research has found evidence of differences in music perception between listeners as a function of their culture, 40,41,64,65,[124][125][126][127][128][129][139][140][141][142][143][144][145][146] the psychological mechanisms underlying the acquisition of these differences are currently poorly understood.…”