AGING AND EXPERIENCE IN THE RECOGNITION OF MUSICAL TRANSPOSITIONS

The authors examined the effects of age, musical experience, and chara cteristics of musical stimuli on a melodic short-term memory task in w hich participants had to recognize whether a tune was an exact transpo sition of another tune recently presented. Participants were musicians and nonmusicians between ages 18 and 30 or 60 and 80. In 4 experiment s, the authors found that age and experience affected different aspect s of the task, with experience becoming more influential when interfer ence was provided during the task. Age and experience interacted only weakly, and neither age nor experience influenced the superiority of t onal over atonal materials. Recognition memory for the sequences did n ot reflect the same pattern of results as the transposition task. The implications of these results for theories of aging, experience, and m usic cognition are discussed.