Studies in Musical Cognition: Comments from a Music Theorist

1984 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edwin Hantz

This article is in three parts. First, four common misconceptions in the psychological literature with regard to the perception of and memory for tonal tunes are isolated and documented. They are (1) that tonal strength is proportional to tune length, (2) that tonality is equivalent to diatonicism, (3) that frequency (pitch) distance is directly proportional to tonal functional distance, and (4) that melodic structure consists only (or mainly) of the note-to-note contour of a melody. Counterexamples to each of these misconceptions are given, forming a framework for a discussion of some of the fundamental properties of tonality. Part two is a brief criticism of short-term recognition paradigms and their use in research on melodies. Part three discusses the limited literature on long-term memory for tunes. The author proposes three modes of long- term memory representations for tunes: images ("visual" shapes), sequences of events ("episodes" of tune-specific contexts), and hierarchic rule-governed structures. It is suggested that the modes may, themselves, constitute a hierarchy, and that accessibility of a given representation is crucially dependent on the requirements of the task and the choice of an appropriate retrieval strategy.

2003 ◽  
Vol 26 (6) ◽  
pp. 754-755
Author(s):  
Frank Rösler ◽  
Martin Heil

The identity of working-memory and long-term memory representations follows from many lines of evidence. However, the data provided by Ruchkin et al. are hardly compelling, as they make unproved assumptions about hypothetical generators. We cite studies from our lab in which congruent slow-wave topographies were found for short-term and long-term memory tasks, strongly suggesting that both activate identical cell assemblies.


2016 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary C. Potter

AbstractRapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of words or pictured scenes provides evidence for a large-capacity conceptual short-term memory (CSTM) that momentarily provides rich associated material from long-term memory, permitting rapid chunking (Potter 1993; 2009; 2012). In perception of scenes as well as language comprehension, we make use of knowledge that briefly exceeds the supposed limits of working memory.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 710-727
Author(s):  
Beula M. Magimairaj ◽  
Naveen K. Nagaraj ◽  
Alexander V. Sergeev ◽  
Natalie J. Benafield

Objectives School-age children with and without parent-reported listening difficulties (LiD) were compared on auditory processing, language, memory, and attention abilities. The objective was to extend what is known so far in the literature about children with LiD by using multiple measures and selective novel measures across the above areas. Design Twenty-six children who were reported by their parents as having LiD and 26 age-matched typically developing children completed clinical tests of auditory processing and multiple measures of language, attention, and memory. All children had normal-range pure-tone hearing thresholds bilaterally. Group differences were examined. Results In addition to significantly poorer speech-perception-in-noise scores, children with LiD had reduced speed and accuracy of word retrieval from long-term memory, poorer short-term memory, sentence recall, and inferencing ability. Statistically significant group differences were of moderate effect size; however, standard test scores of children with LiD were not clinically poor. No statistically significant group differences were observed in attention, working memory capacity, vocabulary, and nonverbal IQ. Conclusions Mild signal-to-noise ratio loss, as reflected by the group mean of children with LiD, supported the children's functional listening problems. In addition, children's relative weakness in select areas of language performance, short-term memory, and long-term memory lexical retrieval speed and accuracy added to previous research on evidence-based areas that need to be evaluated in children with LiD who almost always have heterogenous profiles. Importantly, the functional difficulties faced by children with LiD in relation to their test results indicated, to some extent, that commonly used assessments may not be adequately capturing the children's listening challenges. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12808607


2002 ◽  
Vol 72 (6) ◽  
pp. 516-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
Osamu Ishihara ◽  
Yasuyuki Gondo ◽  
W. Poon Leonard

1978 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-148
Author(s):  
Mary Anne Herndon

In a model of the functioning of short term memory, the encoding of information for subsequent storage in long term memory is simulated. In the encoding process, semantically equivalent paragraphs are detected for recombination into a macro information unit. This recombination process can be used to relieve the limited storage capacity constraint of short term memory and subsequently increase processing efficiency. The results of the simulation give a favorable indication of the success for the use of cluster analysis as a tool to simulate the encoding function in the detection of semantically similar paragraphs.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 172988141769231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ning An ◽  
Shi-Ying Sun ◽  
Xiao-Guang Zhao ◽  
Zeng-Guang Hou

Visual tracking is a challenging computer vision task due to the significant observation changes of the target. By contrast, the tracking task is relatively easy for humans. In this article, we propose a tracker inspired by the cognitive psychological memory mechanism, which decomposes the tracking task into sensory memory register, short-term memory tracker, and long-term memory tracker like humans. The sensory memory register captures information with three-dimensional perception; the short-term memory tracker builds the highly plastic observation model via memory rehearsal; the long-term memory tracker builds the highly stable observation model via memory encoding and retrieval. With the cooperative models, the tracker can easily handle various tracking scenarios. In addition, an appearance-shape learning method is proposed to update the two-dimensional appearance model and three-dimensional shape model appropriately. Extensive experimental results on a large-scale benchmark data set demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art two-dimensional and three-dimensional trackers in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and robustness.


2005 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill C Heathcock ◽  
Anjana N Bhat ◽  
Michele A Lobo ◽  
James (Cole) Galloway

Abstract Background and Purpose. Infants born preterm differ in their spontaneous kicking, as well as their learning and memory abilities in the mobile paradigm, compared with infants born full-term. In the mobile paradigm, a supine infant's ankle is tethered to a mobile so that leg kicks cause a proportional amount of mobile movement. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relative kicking frequency of the tethered (right) and nontethered (left) legs in these 2 groups of infants. Subjects. Ten infants born full-term and 10 infants born preterm (<33 weeks gestational age, <2,500 g) and 10 comparison infants participated in the study. Methods. The relative kicking frequencies of the tethered and nontethered legs were analyzed during learning and short-term and long-term memory periods of the mobile paradigm. Results. Infants born full-term showed an increase in the relative kicking frequency of the tethered leg during the learning period and the short-term memory period but not for the long-term memory period. Infants born preterm did not show a change in kicking pattern for learning or memory periods, and consistently kicked both legs in relatively equal amounts. Discussion and Conclusion. Infants born full-term adapted their baseline kicking frequencies in a task-specific manner to move the mobile and then retained this adaptation for the short-term memory period. In contrast, infants born preterm showed no adaptation, suggesting a lack of purposeful leg control. This lack of control may reflect a general decrease in the ability of infants born preterm to use their limb movements to interact with their environment. As such, the mobile paradigm may be clinically useful in the early assessment and intervention of infants born preterm and at risk for future impairment.


1974 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-501
Author(s):  
Gilbert B. Tunnell ◽  
Philippe R. Falkenberg

Manipulation of the context in a short-term memory paradigm produces changes in the ability to recognize the same material from long-term memory 24 hr. later. If immediate recall is accurate, later recognition is improved if this recall is conducted with the same context as occurred at learning. If immediate recall is completely inaccurate, later recognition is improved if this recall is conducted with different context than was present at learning. Short-term recall did not need to be accurate to transfer the learned nonsense trigrams to long-term memory. Manipulation of context 24 hr. after learning had no effect on recognition. Results are discussed in terms of the Waugh and Norman memory model, Tulving's encoding specificity hypothesis, and interference theory.


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