Age and familiarity effects on musical memory.

• Published in: PLOS ONE
• Main Authors: Sarah A Sauvé, Praveena Satkunarajah, Stephen Cooke, Özgen Demirkaplan, Alicia Follett, Benjamin Rich Zendel
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2024
• Subjects: Medicine; R; Science; Q; Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0305969; https://doaj.org/article/41366bb4a22c4b7884e80edbe1185118

Background A common complaint in older adults is trouble with their memory, especially for new information. Current knowledge about normal aging and changes in memory identify a divide between memory tasks that are unaffected by aging and those that are. Among the unaffected are recognition tasks. These memory tasks rely on accessing well-known information, often include environmental support, and tend to be automatic. Negative age effects on memory are often observed at both encoding and during recall. Older adults often have difficulty with recall tasks, particularly those that require effortful self-initiated processing, episodic memory, and retention of information about contextual cues. Research in memory for music in healthy aging suggests a skill-invariance hypothesis: that age effects dominate when general-purpose cognitive mechanisms are needed to perform the musical task at hand, while experience effects dominate when music-specific knowledge is needed to perform the task [1]. Aims The goals of this pair of studies were to investigate the effects of age and familiarity on musical memory in the context of real pieces of music, and to compare a live concert experimental setting with a lab-based experimental setting. Method Participants' task was to click a button (or press the spacebar) when they heard the target theme in three pieces of music. One was Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and the others were original pieces commissioned for this study, one tonal and one atonal. Participants heard the relevant theme three times before listening to a piece of music. The music was performed by the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra; participants either attended the concert, or watched a recording of the concert in the lab. Participants also completed two short cognitive tests and filled out a questionnaire collecting demographic information and a hearing abilities self-assessment. Results We find a significant effect of familiarity and setting but not of age or musical training on recognition performance as ...