Cognitive abilities Archive

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

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