Musical Training May Improve Working Memory and Long-Term Memory
Professional musicians may have advantages in long-term memory, compared with nonmusicians. Heekyeong Park, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychology, and graduate student James Schaeffer, both at the University of Texas at Arlington, used EEG technology to measure the electrical activity of neurons in the brains of 14 musicians and 15 nonmusicians. The researchers noted processing differences in the frontal and parietal lobe responses.
“Musically trained people are known to process linguistic materials a split second faster than those without training, and previous research also has shown [that] musicians have advantages in working memory,” said Dr. Park. “What we wanted to know is whether there are differences between pictorial and verbal tasks and whether any advantages extend to long-term memory. If proven, those advantages could represent an intervention option to explore for people with cognitive challenges.”
Dr. Park’s laboratory in the UT Arlington College of Science uses EEG, functional MRI (fMRI), and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to research human cognitive neuroscience. To test working memory, the study participants were asked to select pictorial or verbal items that they had just been given along with similar items. After the entire study session was complete participants underwent a test of long-term memory during which they judged whether each test item had previously been studied or was new.
The musicians, all of whom had been playing classical music for more than 15 years, outperformed nonmusicians in EEG-measured neural responses on the working memory tasks. But when long-term memory was tested, the enhanced sensitivity was only found in memory for pictures.
The study has not explored why the advantages might develop. Professional musicians may become more adept at taking in and processing a host of pictorial cues as they navigate musical scores, said Dr. Park.
Dr. Park also observed that musicians’ neural responses in the mid-frontal part of the brain were 300 to 500 µs faster than those of nonmusicians, and responses in the parietal lobe were 400 to 800 µs faster than those of nonmusicians. The parietal lobe is responsible for perceptual processing, attention, and memory.
“Dr. Park’s research uses the latest scientific instrumentation to reveal knowledge about human cognition that was previously unreachable,” said James Grover, Interim Dean of the UT Arlington College of Science. “It provides usable information about far-reaching advantages [that] arts training can bring.” Researchers hope to test more musicians soon to strengthen the findings.
Whatever the mechanism involved, the new research is important because music is helpful for long-term memory for nonverbal events, and “we are all surrounded by non verbal events,” said Dr. Park. “Our work is adding evidence that music training is a good way to improve cognitive abilities,” she said.
Can the Brain Reveal an Adolescent’s Risk of Alcohol Abuse?
Investigators are attempting to identify brain differences that indicate which adolescents are likely to misuse alcohol and other drugs. Such differences may help scientists develop strategies that can prevent drug abuse. At the meeting, researchers presented results from four substudies of the Adolescent Development Study, which is a wide-ranging effort to understand how a teenager’s brain can lead to risky behaviors. The project is led by John VanMeter, PhD, Director of the Center for Functional and Molecular Imaging and Associate Professor of Neurology at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC.
The studies were conducted with a participant pool of 135 preteen and teenage boys and girls with an average age of 12.6. Participants underwent structural and functional MRI to investigate the connection between brain development and behavior. The researchers also used questionnaires and several tests of neurocognitive function, including two tests used specifically while adolescents were scanned: the Continuous Performance Task (CPT), which measures impulsivity, and the Temporal Discounting Task (TD), which quantifies preference for immediate rather than delayed reward.
The first study examined whether lack of connectivity in the brain’s Executive Control Network (ECN) contributes to or results from teen alcohol use.
Tomas Clarke, a research assistant, and Stuart Washington, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. VanMeter’s laboratory, looked at the association between the Drug Use Screening Inventory questionnaire filled out by 32 participants’ parents and brain connectivity within the ECN, which includes the areas that process emotion, impulsivity, and self-control. The questionnaire predicts future alcohol misuse. It does not ask parents about their alcohol or drug use, but examines social behaviors in their children such as irritability, anger, and sadness.
Mr. Clarke categorized the participants into two groups—16 children at high or medium risk for alcohol abuse, based on the test, and 16 at low risk. He then used fMRI scans to analyze connectivity in the ECN. ECN connectivity was significantly lower in the high- and medium-risk groups, compared with the low-risk group.