Individual Differences in Learning and Remembering Music: Auditory versus Visual Presentation

Abstract

We examined the effects of presentation modality and learning style preference on people's ability to learn and remember unfamiliar melodies and sentences. In Experiment 1, we gauged musicians' and nonmusicians' learning efficiency for meaningful and less meaningful melodies as well as sentences when presented visually or auditorily. In Experiment 2, we tested the effects of the same variables on memory. Presentation modality did not make a difference, but learning-style preference did. Visual learners learned visually presented items faster and remembered them better than auditorily presented ones, and auditory learners did the reverse. Also, as expected, meaningful sentences were learned faster and remembered better than less meaningful ones. However, although musicians also learned meaningful melodies faster and remembered them better than less meaningful melodies, this was not the case for nonmusicians.