Active maintenance of musical and linguistic information as a function of musical experience

Abstract

Recent research suggests that linguistic and musical information are processed by shared working memory resources in non-musicians. However, it is still unclear how musical information is actively maintained by those with extensive musical experience. Some evidence suggests that those with musical experience may utilize distinct processing systems for the active maintenance of linguistic and musical information. To explore this possibility, a cross-modal interference paradigm was used in which those with and without musical experience were presented with an initial stimulus (word or chord), followed by intervening stimuli (words, chords, or silence), and then a comparison stimulus (word or chord). The participants’ task was to indicate whether the comparison stimulus was the same or different from the initial stimulus. Results revealed a pattern of data that would be expected if the active maintenance of linguistic and musical information was accomplished by distinct systems in those with musical experience and a unitary system in non-musicians.

Keywords:

• language
• music
• working memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data set associated with this paper can be found through the following link: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/PYDR5

Notes

1 Participants that responded “different” to all practice trails as a result of not following instructions would have obtained a score of 0.67. Thus, a threshold of 0.75 was chosen for the elimination of participants (see Method for a detailed description of the practice trials).

2 In addition to the reported data analysis, the data was also analyzed when excluding the 8 individuals who reported not actively practicing from the musically experienced group. The pattern of data was identical in terms of this analysis.

3 This was increased from the four used in Atherton et al. (2018). This was done in an attempt to avoid potential ceiling effects.

4 Given the group nature of the testing procedure, overt rehearsal was extremely unlikely and not observed.