There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Controversial evidence suggests that music can enhance cognitive performance. In the present study, we examined whether listening to an excerpt of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" had a positive effect on older adults' cognitive performance in two working memory tasks. With a repeated-measures design, older adults were presented with the forward version of the digit span and phonemic fluency in classical music, white-noise and no-music conditions. Classical music significantly increased working memory performance compared with the no-music condition. In addition, this effect did not occur with white noise. The authors discuss this finding in terms of the arousal-and-mood hypothesis and the role of working memory resources in aging.

Related collections

Most cited references 26

Record: found
Abstract: not found
Article: not found

Music and spatial task performance.

Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, Catherine Ky (1993)

0 comments Cited 208 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: not found

Music training improves verbal but not visual memory: cross-sectional and longitudinal explorations in children.

Yim-Chi Ho, Mei-Chun Cheung, Agnes S. Chan (2003)

The hypothesis that music training can improve verbal memory was tested in children. The results showed that children with music training demonstrated better verbal but not visual memory than did their counterparts without such training. When these children were followed up after a year, those who had begun or continued music training demonstrated significant verbal memory improvement. Students who discontinued the training did not show any improvement. Contrary to the differences in verbal memory between the groups, their changes in visual memory were not significantly different. Consistent with previous findings for adults (A. S. Chan, Y. Ho, & M. Cheung, 1998), the results suggest that music training systematically affects memory processing in accordance with possible neuroanatomical modifications in the left temporal lobe.