Implicit knowledge and memory for musical stimuli in musicians and non-musicians

Abstract

The phoneme monitoring task is a musical priming paradigm that demonstrates that both musicians and non-musicians have gained implicit understanding of prevalent harmonic structures. Little research has focused on implicit music learning in musicians and non-musicians. This current study aimed to investigate whether the phoneme monitoring task would identify any implicit memory differences between musicians and non-musicians. It focuses on both implicit knowledge of musical structure and implicit memory for specific musical sequences. Thirty-two musicians and non-musicians (19 female and 13 male) were asked to listen to a seven-chord sequence and decide as quickly as possible whether the final chord ended on the syllable /di/ or /du/. Overall, musicians were faster at the task, though non-musicians made more gains through the blocks of trials. Implicit memory for musical sequence was evident in both musicians and non-musicians. Both groups of participants reacted quicker to sequences that they had heard more than once but showed no explicit knowledge of the familiar sequences.