An Experimental Research On The Influence Of Articulatory Suppression And Attention Refreshing Suppression On Music Memory

The concept of working memory is evolved from short-term memory.It plays an important role in individual cognitive processes such as speech comprehension,problem solving,reasoning and learning.In recent years,researchers have done some empirical studies on working memory from different aspects,which involve a wide range and a larger span.By combing the existing research literature,the author finds that most of the empirical studies on working memory are concentrated in the field of verbal working memory and visual working memory,and less empirical research on nonverbal(for example,music)working memory.The study of music memory belongs to the category of short-term memory.The author found that the study of music and working memory mainly focused on the following aspects: the influence of music on the working memory level,the improvements of music training to working memory,other factors affecting working memory,and the working memory level of musicians and non-musicians,the theory of music memory,and so on.By combing the literature,I also found a phenomenon: most researchers use music as a measure or method,such as the use of different types of music as a stimulus material to examine the effects of verbal working memory on the participants.However,few researchers have studied the music memory of professional music learners from non-verbal level,such as melody memory,rhythm memory and interval memory.The author regard the non-verbal(Music)working memory as a research subject and using the experimental methods which commonly used in verbal working memory to investigate the effects of articulatory suppression and attention refreshing suppression on music memory(the musical memory is mainly related to the melody),and the purpose of the study is to explore whether these two mechanisms will be involved in maintaining the music memory.Edworthy(1986)found the articulatory suppression phenomenon,that is,when the subjects kept repeating the irrelevant pronunciation in the sequence memory task,the number range of immediate series memory decreased.Refreshing is an important part of executive function.The main function of it is to monitor input information,replace old information which is not much related to current task with new information,and constantly modify contents in memory.The attentional refreshing mechanism plays a role in maintaining language information in working memory,and it needs to think regularly about the items that promote the maintenance of information in the memory.The inconsistency between attention refreshing and articulatory suppression on nonverbal working memory reveals a problem that the two mechanisms may be “common operation or independent operation”.There are two experiments in this study to solve the following problems: 1)Do articulatory suppression and attention refreshing suppression affect the melodic memory of the subjects of the music participant? Which has a greater impact? Is it positive or negative? 2)Are the two conditions effect participant independently or collective? The effects of articulatory suppression and attention refreshing suppression on nonverbal working memory were investigate by two experiments.The study assumes that both articulatory suppression and attention refreshing suppression affect the nonverbal(Music)memory of the participant.In the two experiments,a discrimination paradigm was used to test the recognition of the melody.The method was to allow the participant to listen to two melodies.Their task was to determine the identity of the two melodies.The purpose of Experiment 1 was to investigate the effects of articulatory suppression and attention refreshing suppression on the melody memory of subjects,and the effect of which condition was greater.In experiment 1,the participant will listened to a short part of the melody at first.After 8 s delay interval,the participants listen to the second melody which is same or similar with the first one.And the participants need to judge whether the two melodies are the same through use the keyboard.There are four kinds of experimental conditions: no interference,articulatory suppression interference,attention refreshing suppression interference,articulatory suppression interference + attention refreshing suppression interference.The purpose of experiment two is to investigate the interference mechanism of articulatory suppression.The experimental program is the same as the experiment one,and also set four experimental conditions: no interference,articulatory suppression interference,attention refreshing suppression interference,articulatory suppression interference + attention refreshing suppression interference.But in Experiment 2,the articulatory suppression group was required keep silence.and the participant will accept a direct: “Open your mouth,but don't make any sound,you will see a math problems on the screen,then read it but do not make any sound and solve the problem at the same.” Participants were tell to move their mouths so that by observing their mouth movements,the experimenter could also confirm the compliance of the instructions.This is to investigate the interference mechanism of pronunciation suppression,that is,when other conditions are constant,the participants of the articulatory suppression group withdrew the auditory interference from their mouths,in order to test whether the interference from the condition of articulatory suppression comes from the sound of the subjects themselves.The results of the two experiments show that the articulatory suppression can interfere with the participants' melody memory tasks.In Experiment 1,the participants of the articulatory suppression group performed the worst compared with the control group.At the same time,attention refreshing suppression and articulatory suppression did not damage memory better than articulatory suppression alone.Experiment 2 confirmed the findings again,and also confirmed that the location of the interference is related to pronunciation rather than hearing(that is,interference is not caused by the sound of the participants' own sound during the process of pronunciation).These two experiments show that articulatory repetition plays a certain role in maintaining melody memory.In addition,in the two experiments,the participants who attended the attention refreshing group also showed unexpected poor performance,which may caused by the allocation of attention to resources or individual differences.Based on the results of this study,it is not clear how nonverbal stimuli remain in memory.Some researchers believe that there may be a specific mechanism to retell music and store music information,but it is not sure that the same mechanism or different mechanisms is used to store verbal materials and to store audio-coded music materials.In addition,previous studies show that attention refreshing mechanism maintains nonverbal auditory information in working memory.The suppression conditions used in this study significantly interfere with attention refreshing,thus further affecting the retention of nonverbal auditory information.Perhaps attention to refresh mechanism and more detailed resource allocation is worth exploring.There are many problems about refresh mechanism worth exploring.Working memory not only plays an important role in people's cognition and learning,but also plays an important role in music learning and music cognition.The analysis of the effects of verbal working memory on nonverbal working memory can deepen the understanding of nonverbal working memory(Music)by music majors and understand the mechanism and theoretical basis of maintaining music memory,which will help them to learn and use memory strategies in the future.