Aging and Experience in the Recognition of Musical Transpositions

The authors examined the effects of age, musical experience, and characteristics of musical stimuli on a melodic short-term memory task in which participants had to recognize whether a tune was an exact transposition of another tune recently presented. Participants were musicians and nonmusicians be...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychology and aging 1995-09, Vol.10 (3), p.325-342
Main Authors: Halpern, Andrea R, Bartlett, James C, Dowling, W. Jay
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Adult. Elderly
Age Differences
Aged
Aging
Auditory Perception
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Developmental psychology
Experience Level
Experiences
Factors
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Male
Memory
Mental Recall
Middle Aged
Music
Older people
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Recognition
Recognition (Learning)
Short Term Memory
Transposition
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Summary:The authors examined the effects of age, musical experience, and characteristics of musical stimuli on a melodic short-term memory task in which participants had to recognize whether a tune was an exact transposition of another tune recently presented. Participants were musicians and nonmusicians between ages 18 and 30 or 60 and 80. In 4 experiments, the authors found that age and experience affected different aspects of the task, with experience becoming more influential when interference was provided during the task. Age and experience interacted only weakly, and neither age nor experience influenced the superiority of tonal over atonal materials. Recognition memory for the sequences did not reflect the same pattern of results as the transposition task. The implications of these results for theories of aging, experience, and music cognition are discussed.
ISSN:0882-7974
1939-1498
DOI:10.1037/0882-7974.10.3.325