Effect of skill level on recall of visually presented patterns of musical notes

Abstract

Expertise effects in music were studied in a new task: the construction of mental representations from separate fragments. Groups of expert musicians and non-musicians were asked to recall note patterns presented visually note by note. Skill-level, musical well-formedness of the note patterns and presentation mode were varied. The musicians recalled note patterns better than the non-musicians, even though the presentation was visual and successive. Furthermore, only musicians' performance was affected by musical well-formedness of the note patterns when visual gestalt properties, verbal rehearsability, and familiarity of the stimuli were controlled. Musicians were also able to use letter names referring to notes as efficiently as visual notes, which indicates that the better recall of musicians cannot be explained by perceptual visual chunking. These results and the effect of skill level on the distribution of recall errors indicate that the ability to chunk incoming information into meaningful units does not require that complete familiar patterns are accessible to encoding processes, yet previous knowledge stored in long-term memory affects representation construction in working memory. The present method offers a new reliable tool, and its implications to the research on construction of representations and musical imagery are discussed.

Do Older Professional Musicians Have Cognitive Advantages?

“…We compared performance of the two groups on a near-transfer task involving pitch identification and auditory conflict resolution, on several far-transfer tasks involving visuospatial memory span and cognitive control processes (conflict resolution, resistance to distraction, and response inhibition), and on a composite measure of cognitive control. Research with young and middle-aged amateur and professional musicians has shown enhancement on far-transfer tasks involving visuospatial function and cognitive control [12], [19], [40]–[41]. On the basis of enhanced auditory processing and working memory in older amateur musicians [33]–[34], we expected late middle-aged to older professional musicians to perform better than non-musicians on the near-transfer task.…”

Music Rehearsal Increases the Perceptual Span for Notation

“…Expertise increases the ability to recognize and recall a meaningful pattern (Barfield, 1997;Garland & Barry, 1991;Gobet & Simon, 1996;Halpern & Bower, 1982;Kalakoski, 2007;Kawamura, Suzuki, & Morikawa, 2007). Chess experts, for example, can quickly recognize and later recall the number of chess pieces by grouping individual items into meaningful "chunks" (Gobet, 1998;Gobet & Clarkson, 2004;McGregor & Howes, 2002).…”

Cognitive Control in Auditory Working Memory Is Enhanced in Musicians

“…The increased neural activity is explained by stronger acoustic encoding of musical sounds and also by the representation of stimuli in terms of multiple codes that can be exploited automatically [7]. For example, musicians recall visual patterns of successive musical notes better than non-musicians, probably because of musicians' knowledge of sound-labels [8]. However, evidence also indicates that musicians benefit from enhanced domain-general cognitive processes, including enhanced mathematical, verbal, and non-verbal skills [9], [10], [11], and non-musical enhancement of working memory in musicians has repeatedly been demonstrated.…”