NEWS
24 July 2024

Memory for music doesn’t diminish with age

Eighty-year-olds are able to identify familiar tunes just as well as teenagers can.

By Bianca Nogrady

The ability to remember and recognize a musical theme does not seem to be affected by age, unlike many other forms of memory.

“You’ll hear anecdotes all the time of how people with severe Alzheimer’s can't speak, can’t recognize people, but will sing the songs of their childhood or play the piano,” says Sarah Sauvé, a feminist music scientist now at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom.

Past research has shown that many aspects of memory are affected by ageing, such as recall tasks that require real-time processing, whereas recognition tasks that rely on well-known information and automatic processes are not. The effect of age on the ability to recall music has also been investigated, but Sauvé was interested in exploring this effect in a real-world setting such as a concert.

In her study1, published today in PLoS ONE, she tested how well a group of roughly 90 healthy adults, ranging in age from 18 to 86 years, were able to recognize familiar and unfamiliar musical themes at a live concert. Participants were recruited at a performance of the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra in St. John’s, Canada. Another 31 people watched a recording of the concert in a laboratory.

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Age and familiarity effects on musical memory

Sarah A. Sauvé ,Praveena Satkunarajah,Stephen Cooke,Özgen Demirkaplan,Alicia Follett,Benjamin Rich Zendel
Published: July 24, 2024
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0305969

Abstract
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 measured by d’. More specifically, performance is best for the familiar, tonal piece, moderate for the unfamiliar tonal piece and worst for the unfamiliar atonal piece. Performance was better in the live setting than the lab setting.

Conclusions
The absence of an age effect provides encouraging evidence that music’s diverse cues may encourage cognitive scaffolding, in turn improving encoding and subsequent recognition. Better performance in an ecological versus lab setting supports the expansion of ecological studies in the field.

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