The role of divided attention and expertise in melody recognition

Abstract

When attention is divided during memory encoding, performance tends to suffer. The nature of this performance decrement, however, is domain-dependent and often governed by domain-specific expertise. In this study, 111 participants with differing levels of musical expertise (professional musicians, amateur musicians, and non-musicians) were presented with novel melodies under full- or divided-attention conditions in a continuous melody-recognition task. As hypothesized, melody recognition was modulated by musical expertise, as greater expertise was associated with better performance. Recognition performance increased with every additional presentation of a target melody. The divided-attention condition required concurrently performing a non-music related digit-monitoring task while simultaneously listening to the melodies. Memory performance decreased universally in all groups in the divided-attention condition; however, intriguingly musicians also performed significantly better in the concurrent digit-monitoring task than non-musicians. Results provide insight into the role of expertise, attention, and memory in the musical domain, and are discussed in terms of attentional resource models. In light of resource models, an asymmetrical non-linear trade-off between two simultaneous tasks is proposed to explain the present findings.