Effects of Early Musical Experience on Auditory Sequence Memory
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Date
2008-10
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Empirical Musicology Review
Abstract
The present study investigated a possible link between musical training and
immediate memory span by testing experienced musicians and three groups of musically
inexperienced subjects (gymnasts, Psychology 101 students, and video game players) on
sequence memory and word familiarity tasks. By including skilled gymnasts who began
studying their craft by age six, video game players, and Psychology 101 students as comparison
groups, we attempted to control for some of the ways skilled musicians may differ from
participants drawn from the general population in terms of gross motor skills and intensive
experience in a highly skilled domain from an early age. We found that musicians displayed
longer immediate memory spans than the comparison groups on auditory presentation
conditions of the sequence reproductive span task. No differences were observed between the
four groups on the visual conditions of the sequence memory task. These results provide
additional converging support to recent findings showing that early musical experience and
activity-dependent learning may selectively affect verbal rehearsal processes and the allocation
of attention in sequence memory tasks.
Description
Keywords
skilled musicians, memory span, sequence learning
Citation
Empirical Musicology Review, v3 n4 (October 2008), 178-186