Musicians rock on short-term memory and multisensory integration

Musicians may have very good memory for sounds, but does that ability extend to other kinds of stimuli as well? For answers, we assessed musicians’ and non-musicians’ short-term memory for rapidly-presented, quasi-random sequences whose components varied in luminance (visual stimuli), or frequency (auditory stimuli), or both (audiovisual stimuli). In all cases, subjects judged whether a sequence’s last four items replicated its first four. For some audiovisual sequences, the frequency of each auditory item was monotonically related to the accompanying visual item’s luminance; for other audiovisual sequences, frequency and luminance were uncorrelated. Subjects with prior instrumental-training significantly outperformed their untrained counterparts on both auditory and visual sequences, and on sequences of correlated auditory and visual items. Reverse correlation analysis revealed that the correlated, concurrent auditory stream altered how subjects weighted items at particular ordinal positions in a sequence. Finally, congruence between auditory and visual items enabled subjects to perform far better than predicted from simple summation of information from the two modalities, perhaps by engaging special-purpose mechanisms sensitive to audiovisual correlation.