Iconic Memory
-Immediate sensory memory as image persistence
-Ex: By looking outside, you see a nice, sunny day. If you close your eyes, there is an afterimage on your retina for a few moments.
Echoic Memory
-Immediate sensory memory as auditory persistence
-Ex: For a few moments, after hearing a sound, we are able to “hear” it again in our mind’s ear.
Sensory Buffer PAtkinson and Shiffrin)
-This is where immediate sensory memories are being held.
Working Memory Por Short-Term Memory)
-The contents of your present consciousness and awareness
-Ex: when you hold a thought inside your head and you’re about to say it or do something with it -These memories decay rapidly and are not durable unless transferred to long-term memory
Long-Term Memory
-The ability to remember things from some time ago, or that we learned more than a few minutes ago up until a lifetime ago.
-Ex: you remember images in your head from your high school graduation
Important Feature of Long-Term Memory: Durability
-We tend to think of our long-term memories as staying with us all the time Pas being durable)
Episodic Memory
-Remembering subjective or personal experiences or events you know to be true
-Ex: remembering your eighth birthday party Pepisode)
Semantic Memory
-Remembering information or facts
-Ex: where your old house was, the capital of Canada, etc
Procedural Memory
-Knowing how to do things, i.e. motor skills
-Ex: remembering how to walk, how to tie your shoe or how to ride a bike, etc.
Memory Storage:
-Encoding
-You learn different things and encode them into your brain Pan image, visual cue, auditory or semantic cue, etc)
Memory Retrieval
-Trying to remember something that you have originally stored away in your memory
Working Memory Capacity
-Limited
-The number of pieces we can juggle in short-term memory at any one time is between 5 and 9
Chunking
-If there are 15 letters or numbers, it is difficult to remember them all. So, if you “chunk” them into pieces and focus on groups of three, it becomes more familiar and easier to remember.
-Musicians do this all the time.
-When reading, we tend to do this too.
Nickerson and Adams: Pictures of Pennies Study
-Participants could not reliably pick out the accurate picture of the penny
-Similarly, people tend to not have a good memory for exact words in a conversation, but get the “gist” of it.
Objects in the visual world have six perceptual attributes:
- size
- color
- location
- orientation
- luminance6) shape
Object
-Something that maintains its identity across changes in these attributes. -i.e. as you move an object through space, it is still the same object.
Performance of music contains seven perceptual attributes:
- pitch
- rhythm
- tempo
- contour
- timbre
- loudness
- spatial location
Psometimes you can add an 8th – reverberant environment)
**most of these attributes can be changed without altering the others.
Melody
-An auditory object that maintains its identity under certain transformations
-A melody can usually retain its identity long the six dimensions, but not with contour
-The identity of a melody is independent of the actual pitches of the tones played Pin other words, the pitch can be changed and the melody will still be recognizable)
-We can recognize melodies because our memory forms an abstract representation
Contour
-refers to the shape of a melody when musical interval size is ignored, and only the pattern of
“up and down” motion is considered
-i.e. the shape of the melody as rising and falling
-contour is a more general description of the melody
-infants and some animals respond better to contour than to the melody and over time can understand melodic patterns more
Lyrics
-The memory of ballad singers and tellers of epic poetry seem unbelievably large
-Wallace and Rubin claim that these performers do not need to rely on remembering every detail of the song because the structures provide many constraints for the lyrics Pi.e. rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, melodic emphasis, style, and story progression)
-Most of the lyric variations conform to poetic and semantic constraints Pi.e. you can change different ways of presenting the lyrics and they will still sound the same and have the same emphasis)
-You could put in another word that does not affect the meaning, rhyme or rhythm -Memory for lyrics seem to be tied into memory for melody
Amusia
-A broad range of mental deficits involving music perception that usually appears after brain damage
-Deficits include reductions in the perceptions of sound, musical relationships, the ability to perform, read or write music
-Often associated with aphasia Pimpairments in speech) – in many cases they co-occur
Prosopagnosia
-Lesions to certain parts of the brain render patients unable to recognize faces, but their perception of other objects is unimpaired.
Alexia
-lesions to certain parts of the brain cause the inability to read whole words, but individual letters can still be made out and understood
Auditory Agnosia
-a huge mental deficit that arises from bilateral damage to the temporal lobes Pthe auditory cortex, Heschl’s area)
-individuals perceive sounds in their environment to be jumbled and uninterpretable
Prosody
-The “music” of normal speech
Eugene Narmour’s claims of listening to music:
-Requires the processing of both absolute information Pschematic reduction) and relative information Pirreducible idiostructural)
-Both absolute and relative information are retained in long-term memory
Absolute Pitch PAP)
-A person with AP can listen to a tune played on the piano and tell you which chord it was accurately, and vice versa -AP is rare
-Long-term memory encodes the absolute pitch of songs, even in people who did not originally have AP
Levitin’s study on pitch memory for nonmusical individuals
-Subjects were asked to retain the pitch of a tuning fork in memory for one week and then play them by heart
-Results: perfect memory for the tone
Levitin’s study on pitch memory for the first tone of rock songs:
-Subjects sang a rock song and it was compared to a CD
-67% of subjects came between two semitones of the correct pitch, and were consistent -Results: maybe nonmusical individuals also have something much like absolute pitch PAP) just not as specialized in vocabulary
Kinesthetic Sense/Muscle Sense PMuscle Memory)
-Argument: if you sing along with your favorite songs, you develop this sense and your knowledge of proper vocal cord retention drives the results
-Muscle memory is a form of long-term memory
-Muscle memory is not very good and can’t account for precision of performance alone
Flags or Markers in Songs
-they serve as starting points for you
-ex: sing the third verse of the “Twelve Days of Christmas”
-it allows you to jump to a certain point in a song without having to go through everything
Encoding Tempo Information in Memory
-It appears people encode tempo information in memory with a high degree of precision, even nonmusical individuals