How musical rhythm training improves short-term memory for faces

Abstract

Playing a musical instrument engages numerous cognitive abilities, including sensory perception, selective attention, and short-term memory. Mounting evidence indicates that engaging these cognitive functions during musical training will improve performance of these same functions. Yet, it remains unclear the extent these benefits may extend to nonmusical tasks, and what neural mechanisms may enable such transfer. Here, we conducted a preregistered randomized clinical trial where nonmusicians underwent 8 wk of either digital musical rhythm training or word search as control. Only musical rhythm training placed demands on short-term memory, as well as demands on visual perception and selective attention, which are known to facilitate short-term memory. As hypothesized, only the rhythm training group exhibited improved short-term memory on a face recognition task, thereby providing important evidence that musical rhythm training can benefit performance on a nonmusical task. Analysis of electroencephalography data showed that neural activity associated with sensory processing and selective attention were unchanged by training. Rather, rhythm training facilitated neural activity associated with short-term memory encoding, as indexed by an increased P3 of the event-related potential to face stimuli. Moreover, short-term memory maintenance was enhanced, as evidenced by increased two-class (face/scene) decoding accuracy. Activity from both the encoding and maintenance periods each highlight the right superior parietal lobule (SPL) as a source for training-related changes. Together, these results suggest musical rhythm training may improve memory for faces by facilitating activity within the SPL to promote how memories are encoded and maintained, which can be used in a domain-general manner to enhance performance on a nonmusical task.

Digital rhythm training improves reading fluency in children

“…In contrast to our null effect of rhythm training on working memory, we recently observed that digital rhythm training can improve short‐term memory for faces in older adults (Zanto et al., 2022). Although more research will be needed to understand the specificity of rhythm training on memory ability, there are several reasons why rhythm training may differentially affect memory.…”

“…Musical rhythm training was conducted using a custom-designed video game, Coherence (Figure 1). Coherence was created at UCSF Neuroscape and incorporates closed-loop adaptive algorithms to consistently challenge the participant at a high level, an approach which is thought to optimize training effects (Mishra et al, 2016;Ziegler et al, 2022) and lead to transfer of benefits to an array of cognitive abilities (Anguera et al, 2013(Anguera et al, , 2022Mishra et al, 2014;Nandi et al, 2023;Wais et al, 2021;Zanto et al, 2022;Ziegler et al, 2019). It was played in the classroom on an iPad tablet that permits tapping on the screen akin to certain types of drumming.…”

“…To achieve the primary goal of assessing efficacy of this interven- (Hannon & Trainor, 2007), which in a domain-general manner then facilitates math and language abilities (Kljajević, 2010;Patel, 2003;van de Cavey & Hartsuiker, 2016). Indeed, we have recently demonstrated that digital rhythm training can improve cognitive control in healthy older adults, specifically, temporal attention (the ability to orient attention in time) (Nandi et al, 2023) and short-term memory (Zanto et al, 2022). It is therefore plausible that children will also exhibit improvements in cognitive control functions following rhythm training, which may predict alterations in math and language ability.…”

Early musical training benefits to non-musical cognitive ability associated with the Gestalt principles

“…Many studies have confirmed the effect of musical training ( George and Coch, 2011 ; Wong and Gauthier, 2012 ; Matthews et al, 2018 ), even late or short musical training ( Wong et al, 2019 ; Che et al, 2022 ; Zanto et al, 2022 ), on visual perception, but no study has examined the effect of musical training on visual perception associated with the Gestalt principles as far as we know. Through the Visual Closure subset from the MVPT, the current study confirms our hypothesis that, unlike late musical training, early musical training is beneficial to non-musical cognitive ability associated with Gestalt-like ability.…”

The psychophysiology of music-based interventions and the experience of pain

“…Different frequencies of sound vibration can affect a wide range of neurological and physiological functions, gamma waves (around 40 Hz) having significant effects on various levels of neural plasticity (reviewed in Bartel and Mosabbir, 2021). Music is of course made up of a vast array of sound frequencies and has been shown to have measurable effects on oscillatory activity (Thaut et al, 2005;Fujioka et al, 2015;Kučikienė and Praninskienė, 2018;Yurgil et al, 2020;Lerousseau et al, 2021;Yang et al, 2022;Nandi et al, 2023). Interestingly then, in subjects listening to preferred music, EEG recordings revealed reduced low frequency oscillations associated with lower ratings of pain (Lu et al, 2019), and Gu et al (2020) reported that, compared to happy or neutral music, sad music was the most effective in alleviating pain, associated with altered brain oscillations in beta and gamma bands.…”