Week 3 Long Memory and Musical Cognition: Processing, Storage, and Cultural Context

Overview of Cognition and Memory

• Etymology of Cognition: Derived from the Latin root cognoscere, which translates to ‘to know.’
• Definition of Cognition: Refers to everything related to knowledge, specifically the accumulation of information acquired through learning or experience. It is the ability to process information via:
  • Perception: Stimuli received through the senses.
  • Knowledge: Information acquired through experience.
  • Personal Characteristics: Elements that allow an individual to integrate information to evaluate and interpret the world.
• Definition of Memory: The cognitive function that allows for the coding, storage, and recovery of information from the past. It is a fundamental process for learning and the creation of a sense of identity.

Cognitive Models of Auditory Memory

• Historical Models:
  • Sperling (1960) and Darwin, Turvey, and Crowder (1972): Defined the brief sensory store known as echoic memory.
  • Baddeley and Hitch (1974): Introduced the models for working memory and long-term memory.
• Integrated Model: Current knowledge integrates these to describe auditory memory as a progression from a brief sensory buffer to working memory and eventually long-term storage.

Echoic Memory: The Initial Buffer

• Function: Acts as the initial buffer where incoming sensory information is stored.
• Duration: Information is stored for a very short duration, approximately $1 \text{--} 2 \text{ seconds}$.
• Capacity: It can perceive a very large amount of environmental auditory information.
• Example: Being distracted during a conversation but still being able to recall the last few words said to pick the conversation back up is an example of the echoic memory store.
• Attention: Information must be attended to (paid attention to) to pass into working memory. Unattended information is not perceived and does not move to the next stage.
• In Music: Sound events are grouped into larger sequences. When attended to, rhythmic patterns and brief melodic phrases pass from echoic to working memory.

Working Memory (Short-Term Memory)

• Description: Information that is currently and actively being thought about and utilized.
• Capacity (Miller, 1956): Limited capacity, averaging between 5 and 9 unique items, known as the ‘magic number $7 \pm 2$’.
• Duration: Auditory information in working memory lasts for a maximum of about $20\text{ seconds}$.
• Chunking: The capacity of working memory can be increased by grouping information into chunks.
  • Example: Long phone or credit card numbers are grouped into patterns of 3 or 4 units. A $16\text{-digit}$ number can be held if stored as individual chunks.
  • In Music: Musical phrases or rhythmic patterns ($4 \text{ to } 8 \text{ seconds}$ long) fit easily into working memory and can be chunked into sequences forming longer melodies.
• Components of Working Memory (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974; Baddeley, 2000):
  • Phonological Loop: Involved in the rehearsal and storage of verbal/auditory information. Repetition (subvocalization) helps pass this to long-term memory.
  • Visuospatial Sketchpad: Stores visual information.
  • Episodic Buffer: Stores brief episodes of life experiences and events.
  • Central Executive: Coordinates operations between the three buffers above.
• Rehearsal in Music: Composers repeat phrases or motifs to aid listener rehearsal. Musicians break pieces into sections, playing them repeatedly to move the information into long-term memory for performance.

Long-Term Memory (LTM)

• Definition: The storage and recognition of information over long time frames, ranging from hours to decades.
• Recognition Memory Components (Jacoby, 1991; Yonelinas, 2002):
  • Recollection: Recalling specific details of an event.
  • Familiarity: Awareness of having encountered something before without recalling further details.

Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI) - Earworms

• Definition: A musical idea that loops in the head without conscious effort or sensory stimulation. Also known as 'earworms.'
• Characteristics:
  • Persistence in the imagination (Williamson et al., 2012).
  • Consists of a short segment of music that loops without conscious control (Floridou & M6ullensiefen, 2015).
  • Thought to recruit the phonological loop in working memory (Hubbard, 2010).
• Propensity Factors:
  • Mind-wandering (Floridou & M6ullensiefen, 2015).
  • Tasks that are exceptionally difficult (e.g., hard Sudoku), leading the mind to wander (Hyman et al., 2013).
  • Recent or repeated exposure to a song (Hyman et al., 2015; Williamson et al., 2011).
  • Frequent music listening or practice (Liikkanen, 2008).
  • Demographics: More likely in females (Liikkanen, 2008).
• Triggers:
  • Associative cues: People, places, or anticipating a concert.
  • Mood matching: If current mood matches the music's mood.
  • Stress or dreaming.
  • "Catching" it: Hearing someone else describe a song.
• Cessation Methods:
  • Chewing Gum: Uses the physical mechanisms of the mouth involved in subvocalization, interfering with the phonological loop (Beaman, Powell, & Rapley, 2006).
  • Distraction: Listening to another piece of music (Brown, 2015).
  • Mindfulness Meditation: Less extensively studied but attempted (Euser, Oosterhoff, & van Balkom, 2016).
  • Note on Thought Suppression: Trying hard not to think of an earworm has a paradoxical effect, priming the memory pathways further (e.g., the "white bear" experiment).

Explicit (Declarative) Memory in Music

• Definition: Long-term memory that involves conscious recall of facts or events.
• Episodic (Autobiographical) Memory: Memory for specific life events.
  • Includes watching performances or hearing specific songs associated with life events (Schulkind, Hennis, & Rubin, 1999).
  • Reminiscence Bump: Formation of particularly strong autobiographical memories during late adolescence and early adulthood (ages $10$ to $30$).
  • Cascading Reminiscence Bumps (Krumhansl & Zupnick, 2013): Affinity/memory for music from one's own reminiscence bump as well as the music associated with one's parents' or caregivers' reminiscence bumps.
• Semantic Memory: Memory for learned information, facts, figures, and categories.
  • Involves categorization (e.g., learning distinguishing features of animals).
  • In music: Grammar, theory, chord structures, and the ability to read music score annotations.

Implicit (Non-Declarative) Memory in Music

• Definition: Memory that cannot be articulated; occurs without conscious awareness.
• Procedural Memory: Memory for physical tasks and common day-to-day activities.
  • Examples: Riding a bike, driving a car, tying shoelaces.
  • In Music: Learning to play an instrument. Initially conscious, it becomes automatic. This allows musicians to perform complex sequences of notes without thinking of each individual movement.
• Priming: Repeated exposure to an idea allows for faster recall due to recently fired neural pathways requiring less energy.
  • Experimental Evidence: If a participant sees the word $CHEESE$ in a list, they are more likely to complete $CH \_ \_ S \_$ as $CHEESE$ than $CHOOSE$.
• Implicit (Statistical) Learning: Learning complex rules (like tonal structures and harmony) without intention or awareness (Rohrmeier & Rebuschat, 2012).
  • Explains why consonance and dissonance are culturally based; they depend on exposure to semantic structures (McLachlan et al., 2013).

Musical Parameters: Definitions and Perception

• Pitch: The quality of sound that fixes its position in a scale, determined by the fundamental wave-frequency (Haynes & Cooke, 2001).
  • Psychoacoustics: Hair follicles in the ear are arranged tonotopically. Pitch is a psychological phenomenon perceived in the brain, not the external world (Levitin, 2006).
  • Octave Equivalence: Tones with a frequency ratio of $2:1$ are perceived as very similar; the scale repeats every octave (Deutsch, 1969).
• Contour: The outline of any figure, specifically the rise and fall of a melody in memory.
  • W. Jay Dowling: Discovered contour is stored separately from specific pitches. Participants can recognize melodies with the same contour even if transposed or played with different intervals (tonal transposition).
  • Development: Infants as young as $5 \text{ months}$ can recognize changes in contour. This helps in understanding speech rise and fall (Dowling, 1982).
• Rhythm: Regulated succession of strong or weak elements (durational patternings).
  • Tempo: Speed of pulses, measured in beats per minute (bpm). Average detection threshold of variations is approximately $4\%$.
  • Meter: Grouping of the underlying pulse, typically in 2, 3, or 4 beats in Western music.
  • Accent: Patterns of strong/weak weight within a meter (e.g., emphasis on beats 1 and 3).
  • Duration: The length of time a note sounds.
• Tonality: Systematic arrangement of pitch phenomena and relationships, often centered around a tonic note (Hyer, 2001).

Developmental Stages of Musical Perception

• 5-Year-Olds: Find tonal and atonal melodies equally difficult to recognize because they lack an internal abstraction of the musical scale.
• 8-Year-Olds: Can recognize three-note tonal melodies better than atonal ones and can recognize transpositions to different notes. This indicates enough musical exposure to understand scale abstractions (Dowling, 1978).

Tonal Hierarchies and Cultural Influence

• Probe-Tone Method (Krumhansl & Kessler, 1982): Evaluates how well a note completes a scale context.
• Key Findings:
  • In $C \text{ Major}$: Tonic (C) is highest, followed by Perfect Fifth (G) and Major Third (E).
  • In $C \text{ Minor}$: Tonic (C) is highest, followed by Minor Third (Eb) and Perfect Fifth (G).
  • Consonance/Dissonance: Dissonant notes include Minor Second (C#), Augmented Fourth (F#), and Sevenths (Bb/B). Distant/dissonant notes depend on the specific key context.
• Cultural Relativity: Studies show North Indian and Balinese music have style-appropriate tonal hierarchies (Castellano et al., 1984; Kessler et al., 1984).
• Rock vs. Classical: Pitch organization in rock is more permissive and less strictly hierarchical than in classical music (Vuvan & Hughes, 2021).

Cognitive Hierarchy Study (Halpern, 1984)

• Method: Used novel melodies varied by rhythm, pitch contour, and mode (major/minor).
• Hierarchy for Non-Musicians: Rhythm is the most important factor, followed by contour. Harmony (tonality) is prioritized the lowest.
• Hierarchy for Musicians: Follows the same pattern but allows for significantly more subtle and complex judgments due to training.

Neuropsychology of Music

• Brain Regions:
  • Wernicke’s Area and Broca’s Area: Activated in musicians during musical activity, even without linguistic content (Zhang et al., 2017; Sluming et al., 2007).
  • Limbic System: Strong activation during context-specific musical stimuli.
• Cognitive Advantages: Musicians performed better on complex $3\text{D}$ mental rotation tasks, recruiting Broca’s area (Sluming et al., 2007).
• Audiation: The cognitive process of hearing and comprehending music in the head without physical sound (‘mind’s ear’).

Music and Dementia

• Episodic Memory Retrieval: Musical memories provide a "significant awakening" and means of discourse for people with dementia.
• Kelly et al. (2024): Case study of married couples using telehealth music therapy. Persons with dementia experienced self-directed reminiscence for specific memories associated with the era of the music.
• Playlist Creation: The peak of recollection for popular music occurs in teenage years (Rao et al., 2021). This knowledge allows for the creation of meaningful playlists for dementia patients based on their reminiscence bump.