Temporal grouping effects in verbal and musical short-term memory: Is serial order representation domain-general?

The question of the domain-general versus domain-specific nature of the serial order mechanisms involved in short-term memory is currently under debate. The present study aimed at addressing this question through the study of temporal grouping effects in short-term memory tasks with musical material, a domain which has received little interest so far. The goal was to determine whether positional coding—currently the best account of grouping effect in verbal short-term memory—represents a viable mechanism to explain grouping effects in the musical domain. In a first experiment, non-musicians performed serial reconstruction of 6-tone sequences, where half of the sequences was grouped by groups of three items and the other half presented at a regular pace. The overall data pattern suggests that temporal grouping exerts on tone sequences reconstruction the same effects as in the verbal domain, except for ordering errors which were not characterised by the typical increase of interpositions. This pattern has been replicated in two additional experiments with verbal material, using the same grouping structure as in the musical experiment. The findings support that verbal and musical short-term memory domains are characterised by similar temporal grouping effects for the recall of 6-item lists grouped by three, but it also suggests the existence of boundary condition to observe an increase in interposition errors predicted by positional theories.