Memory note professional#

It has been shown that the capacity of verbal WM is modulated by the articulatory time of the words. However, regardless of the difference between verbal and tonal WM, whether the number of notes or the length of note sequence or both, determines the capacity of tonal WM remains unclear. The effect of sequence length has also been examined in other studies, showing that participants’ memory span for sequences consisting long words was smaller than short words with fewer syllables or shorter duration, the so-called “the word length effect”. It has been shown that participants’ performance in verbal WM tasks depends on the length of a verbal sequence to be memorized the longer the sequence, the poorer the performance. Īn important question addressed by researchers studying auditory WM is whether the number of items or the duration of stimulus determines the capacity limit of WM. Neural imaging studies have shown that certain brain areas are specifically involved in the tonal WM but not in the verbal WM. Another piece of supporting evidence is that amusics exhibit deficits in the pitch memory but not in the verbal memory. For example, the interference between two verbal WM tasks is stronger than the interference between a verbal WM task and a tonal WM task. Behavioral studies have suggested that the tonal WM involves different mechanisms than the verbal WM.

The latter is referred to as the tonal WM. Auditory WM stores both phonological information that form verbal representations such as words and phonemes, and non-phonological information such as pitch, speech prosody, and timbre. Working memory (WM) refers to a cognitive system where information is temporarily stored with a limited capacity that allows for online manipulation of the maintained information. Furthermore, the present study demonstrated that N-back tonal task is a quantitative and sensitive measure of the effect of musical training on tonal WM. These findings indicate that the capacity of tonal WM is determined by the number of notes but not the duration of notes in a sequence to be memorized, suggesting a different mechanism underlying tonal WM from verbal WM. In addition, within a minimum musical context, musicians outperformed non-musicians in the N-back tonal task but not the forward tone sequence discrimination task. Results show that the number of notes, but not the duration of notes in a tone sequence significantly affects tonal WM performance for both musicians and non-musicians.

The forward tonal discrimination task in Experiment 1 tested the maintenance of the tonal information and the backward N-back tonal task in Experiment 2 probed the running memory span of tonal information.

Memory note professional#

We investigated in the present study to what degree that the number and the duration of notes in a sequence influence the tonal WM in participants with or without professional musical training. Previous research has suggested that verbal WM performance is determined by the duration instead of the number of verbal materials. Tonal working memory (WM) refers to the maintenance and the online manipulation of tonal information and has been suggested to involve different mechanisms than verbal WM.