Author: Francesca Talamini

Categories
Cognitive abilities Music Music expertise

Musicians’ and nonmuscians’ memory skills

Background Becoming a musician requires a great and constant effort. Usually a musician has started at a very young age to learn an instrument. Learning to play an instrument involves multiple cognitive faculties and abilities, such as memory, attention, executive functions, motor coordination, all simultaneously active. It is no surprising that psychologists and neuroscientists have long been interested in studying musicians, to uncover possible cognitive and neuronal changes that are supposed to be caused by the long training. Related Studies In particular, several studies have investigated memory skills. Some experiments observed how musicians perform better than nonmusicians in short-term memory and working memory, also for stimuli that are not directly related to music (e.g., verbal stimuli). Although there is some evidence supporting this advantage, the situation is still not clear, with contrasting results that might depend on the heterogeneous designs chosen by different researchers. Moreover, these studies have often small sample sizes, making it difficult to draw sure conclusions, and possibly having an insufficient statistical power to detect an effect, if the effect is there (type II errors). Our Study We have currently an international project that aims at clarifying this matter: have musicians better memory than nonmusicians? We will focus specifically on short-term memory, and will present span and recognition tasks assessing memory for different types of stimuli (i.e., musical, verbal, visuospatial). We will also collect several possible confounding and explanatory variables, such as intelligence, executive functions, socio-economical status, education, personality. The study is designed as a multilab. This means that several units around the world (current number of interested labs = 30) will collect participants to reach together a large sample size. The study is also designed as a registered report, meaning that everything concerning introduction, hypotheses, methods, and analyses has been already written and submitted to a journal prior to the data collection, to guarantee the highest standards possible in research practices. The project is led by Dr. Massimo Grassi, University of Padova, and Francesca Talamini. The project has received in principle acceptance* in the prestigious journal “Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science”. Data collection will start soon! Stay tuned! *”IPA”, in principle acceptance, means that the journal will publish the study’s results no matter the outcome. References Talamini, F., Altoè, G., Carretti, B., & Grassi, M. (2017). Musicians have better memory than nonmusicians: A meta-analysis. PLOS ONE, 12(10), e0186773. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0186773 Schlaug, G. (2001). The Brain of Musicians. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 930(1), 281–299. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2001.tb05739.x Schellenberg, E. G. (2020). Music Training, Individual Differences, and Plasticity. In Educational Neuroscience. Routledge. Swaminathan, S., & Schellenberg, E. G. (2019). Music Training and Cognitive Abilities: Associations, Causes, and Consequences. In M. H. Thaut & D. A. Hodges (A c. Di), The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Brain (pagg. 644–670). Oxford University Press

Categories
Emotion Music

Music emotions and congruency effects

Has it ever happened to you to feel an emotion while listening to a piece of music? I’m sure it did. Music is in fact known to be a powerful mean to evoke emotions. Emotions felt during listening to music can be assessed subjectively (by asking individuals to report the emotions they feel) or objectively (by looking at physiological / neuronal activity changes). The use of self-report questionnaires would have higher validity if accompanied by an objective assessment, to ascertain that the individual does really feel something. In fact, it is possible that a person recognizes that a music piece conveys happiness, but s/he  won’t really feel the happiness. Using both objective and subjective methods seem to be thus the best solution. However, the current available objective methods (e.g., skin conductance, EEG, fMRI, heart rate), require to test participants in the lab with specific instruments, sometimes expensive and time consuming. Finding an alternative objective method seems therefore important. Our Research Project In the present research project, we are investigating behavioral methods that could be used to have an objective assessment of music felt emotions. The first attempt to do so, has made use of the mood-congruency effects, for which, when an individual is in a specific mood, the subsequent attentive and memory processes will be congruent to that specific mood. For example, if you feel sad, you are more likely to notice sad stimuli in the environment and recall sadder events to your memory. Given the known effect of mood on subsequent cognitive processes, we asked ourselves: if music is able to make you feel an emotion, can this felt emotion affect your mood, and in turn affect your cognitive processes? In a first study we tried to answer this question, by asking our participants to listen to music and to look at different pictures right after each music piece. The pictures could be either congruent or incongruent with respect to the emotion evoked by the music. We subsequently present a memory task, where the participants had to judge whether a picture was presented before with the music or not. We hypothesized that congruent pictures would be better memorized than incogruent ones if music is able to influence your mood. And this is what we found! [Read the whole study here] However, one study only is not sufficient to shout “eureka”, and we are currently working on follow up studies that will shed light on this effect, its solidity, and its causes. Stay tuned! References Talamini, F., Eller, G., Vigl, J., & Zentner, M. (2022). Musical emotions affect memory for emotional pictures. Sci Rep 12, 10636. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-15032-w Krumhansl, C. L. (1997). An exploratory study of musical emotions and psychophysiology. Can. J. Exp. Psychol. Can. Psychol. ExpĂ©rimentale 51, 336–353. Zentner, M. & Eerola, T. (2010). Self-report measures and models. In Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications 187–221 . Oxford University Press. Lewis, P. A. & Critchley, H. D. (2003). Mood-dependent memory. Trends Cogn. Sci. 7, 431–433.

Categories
Cognitive abilities Music Music perception

Contour Perception

When you listen to music, a salient element that helps you processing and remembering a certain music piece is the melodic contour. This can be defined as the up and down pattern that is created by the pitch change direction. For example, if the notes in the melody are increasing in pitch one after the other, the contour will be defined as “ascending”. In the opposite case, we will have a descending pattern. Interestingly, contour is not only elicited by pitch change (i.e., in melodies), but it can be present also with other types of stimuli that are not directly related to music. For example, contour can be elicited by varying the loudness of a tone, or the luminance of an image. We have currently a collaboration with Dr. Barbara Tillmann (University of Bourgogne), and Dr. Anne Caclin (Center of Neuroscience of Lyon -CNRL), to investigate more deeply the underlying mechanisms of contour perception with visual (i.e., luminance) stimuli. In a recent lab experiment we assessed whether the perception and memorization of visual contour (with luminance variations) could be improved by presenting a melody before the luminance sequence, with the same exact contour (e.g., higher pitch = lighter color, lower pitch = darker color). We have also assessed whether different individual skills in music and pitch perception and memory correlated with the ability to perceive visual contour. Results showed that including a melody before the luminance sequence was indeed helping participants to memorize the visual contour better. Music and pitch perception and memory abilities correlated with this capacity. Find more about it! More questions? Interested in helping in future studies on this topic (e.g., internship)? Send a e-mail