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Musical expertise shapes visual-melodic memory integration

Music can act as a mnemonic device that can elicit multiple memories. How musical and non-musical information integrate into complex cross-modal memory representations has however rarely been investigated. Here, we studied the ability of human subjects to associate visual objects with melodies. Musi...

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Autores principales: Hoffmann, Martina, Schmidt, Alexander, Ploner, Christoph J.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9637918/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36353073
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.973164
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author Hoffmann, Martina
Schmidt, Alexander
Ploner, Christoph J.
author_facet Hoffmann, Martina
Schmidt, Alexander
Ploner, Christoph J.
author_sort Hoffmann, Martina
collection PubMed
description Music can act as a mnemonic device that can elicit multiple memories. How musical and non-musical information integrate into complex cross-modal memory representations has however rarely been investigated. Here, we studied the ability of human subjects to associate visual objects with melodies. Musical laypersons and professional musicians performed an associative inference task that tested the ability to form and memorize paired associations between objects and melodies (“direct trials”) and to integrate these pairs into more complex representations where melodies are linked with two objects across trials (“indirect trials”). We further investigated whether and how musical expertise modulates these two processes. We analyzed accuracy and reaction times (RTs) of direct and indirect trials in both groups. We reasoned that the musical and cross-modal memory demands of musicianship might modulate performance in the task and might thus reveal mechanisms that underlie the association and integration of visual information with musical information. Although musicians showed a higher overall memory accuracy, non-musicians’ accuracy was well above chance level in both trial types, thus indicating a significant ability to associate and integrate musical with visual information even in musically untrained subjects. However, non-musicians showed shorter RTs in indirect compared to direct trials, whereas the reverse pattern was found in musicians. Moreover, accuracy of direct and indirect trials correlated significantly in musicians but not in non-musicians. Consistent with previous accounts of visual associative memory, we interpret these findings as suggestive of at least two complimentary mechanisms that contribute to visual-melodic memory integration. (I) A default mechanism that mainly operates at encoding of complex visual-melodic associations and that works with surprising efficacy even in musically untrained subjects. (II) A retrieval-based mechanism that critically depends on an expert ability to maintain and discriminate visual-melodic associations across extended memory delays. Future studies may investigate how these mechanisms contribute to the everyday experience of music-evoked memories.
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spelling pubmed-96379182022-11-08 Musical expertise shapes visual-melodic memory integration Hoffmann, Martina Schmidt, Alexander Ploner, Christoph J. Front Psychol Psychology Music can act as a mnemonic device that can elicit multiple memories. How musical and non-musical information integrate into complex cross-modal memory representations has however rarely been investigated. Here, we studied the ability of human subjects to associate visual objects with melodies. Musical laypersons and professional musicians performed an associative inference task that tested the ability to form and memorize paired associations between objects and melodies (“direct trials”) and to integrate these pairs into more complex representations where melodies are linked with two objects across trials (“indirect trials”). We further investigated whether and how musical expertise modulates these two processes. We analyzed accuracy and reaction times (RTs) of direct and indirect trials in both groups. We reasoned that the musical and cross-modal memory demands of musicianship might modulate performance in the task and might thus reveal mechanisms that underlie the association and integration of visual information with musical information. Although musicians showed a higher overall memory accuracy, non-musicians’ accuracy was well above chance level in both trial types, thus indicating a significant ability to associate and integrate musical with visual information even in musically untrained subjects. However, non-musicians showed shorter RTs in indirect compared to direct trials, whereas the reverse pattern was found in musicians. Moreover, accuracy of direct and indirect trials correlated significantly in musicians but not in non-musicians. Consistent with previous accounts of visual associative memory, we interpret these findings as suggestive of at least two complimentary mechanisms that contribute to visual-melodic memory integration. (I) A default mechanism that mainly operates at encoding of complex visual-melodic associations and that works with surprising efficacy even in musically untrained subjects. (II) A retrieval-based mechanism that critically depends on an expert ability to maintain and discriminate visual-melodic associations across extended memory delays. Future studies may investigate how these mechanisms contribute to the everyday experience of music-evoked memories. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-10-24 /pmc/articles/PMC9637918/ /pubmed/36353073 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.973164 Text en Copyright © 2022 Hoffmann, Schmidt and Ploner. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Hoffmann, Martina
Schmidt, Alexander
Ploner, Christoph J.
Musical expertise shapes visual-melodic memory integration
title Musical expertise shapes visual-melodic memory integration
title_full Musical expertise shapes visual-melodic memory integration
title_fullStr Musical expertise shapes visual-melodic memory integration
title_full_unstemmed Musical expertise shapes visual-melodic memory integration
title_short Musical expertise shapes visual-melodic memory integration
title_sort musical expertise shapes visual-melodic memory integration
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9637918/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36353073
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.973164
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