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Auditory Memory vs. Visual Memory

Visual Memory

Extremely high capacity.

  • Subjects were shown 10,000 images
  • Recal was 83%
  • (Standing, 1973)

People not only remember the gist but also an incredible amount of detail (Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, & Olivia, 2008).

Visual and Auditory Memory are not Equal

In order to equate visual and auditory memory performance, we needed high-quality environmental sounds and severely degraded visual images.

Musicians

Historically, musicians have shown increased ability in a variety of tasks over nonmusicians.

Musicians can more easiely detect melody, certain sounds and pitch than non musicians.

Musicians have fudamentally different auditory abilities from nonmusicians.

Might musical training augment an individuals ability to remember not only music, but nonmusical sounds as well?

?

Is the superiority of visual recognition memory over auditory recognition memory a by-product of the dominance of the visual modality in humans?

Is the reason we have better visual memory over auditory memory because humans are naturally more visually stimulated?

Experiments 1A and 1B

Participants

Musiciains

  • 8-10 trained musicians
  • 28.31 years old (SD: 8.26)

Non-Musiciains

  • 8-10 non musicians
  • 27.12 years old (SD: 6.62)

Both, not significantly different in their ages or socioeconomic status.

Stimuli

  • 258 well known pop songs
  • 99 unfamiliar music clips
  • 90 environmental sound clips
  • 258 isolated images
  • 99 abstract art pieces
  • Presented sequentially for 5-12 seconds each

Procedure

60-172 stimuli were presented for between 5 and 12 seconds in the study phase.

In the test phase, the same stimuli were presented and the subject had to classify each stimulus as old or new.

Experiments 2A and 2B

Participants

Musiciains

  • 8 trained musicians
  • 26.88 years old (SD: 3.72)
  • Non-Musicians
  • 30.5 years old (SD: 5.73)

Both, not significantly different in their ages or average educational score.

Stimuli

  • 258 visual images
  • 258 music clips
  • Same stimuli used in experiments 1A and 1B
  • Shown sequentially for exactly 5 seconds

Procedure

In the test phase, the same stimuli were presented and the subject had to classify each stimulus as old or new.

Results

"Taken together, both experiments show that even musicians, who have superior memory abilities across the auditory modality, cannot remember sounds as well as visual images (Cohen, Evans, Horowitz, Wolfe, 2011)"

Musicians have improved memory across the auditory domain but not in the visual domain.

Even when numerous steps were taken in an attempt to increase auditory memory performance, we still could not find a group of participants and a stimulus set that allowed performance to equal that for visual memory.

(Cohen, Evans, Horowitz, Wolfe, 2011)

It was specifically the episodic memory for a recent set of stimuli that was better for all observers in the visual than in the auditory domain and better for musicians than for nonmusicians in the auditory domain.

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