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This study proves that in the field of music memory, the elderly perform just as well as the young. The researchers further pointed out that many studies have found that music training can also serve as a cognitive "scaffold" to improve cognitive abilities in other areas by maintaining cognitive skills during music listening. This provides a scientific basis for music rehabilitation and music training for the elderly.

It is generally believed that in the aging process, as people age, cognitive abilities such as memory tend to gradually decline, even affecting their lives and work. However, scientists have found that when it comes to remembering and recognizing certain specific content, people are not "getting more confused as they get older." A recent study shows that the elderly may not be inferior to young people in terms of music memory, and familiarity with music seems to provide cognitive support, helping the elderly to better remember and recognize music.

The study, titled "Age and Familiarity Effects on Musical Memory," was published in the journal PLOS ONE on July 24, 2024. The authors are five scientists from Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, including Sarah A. Sauvé, Praveena Satkunarajah, and Stephen Cooke. The researchers conducted an experiment on 139 participants aged 20 to 80, asking them to identify the music they had heard, record their performance in the process, and analyze it.

It is not only the ability to memorize that helps people remember things; previous knowledge and experience can also help people better understand and remember the content. Previous studies have shown that when general cognitive mechanisms are needed to perform the music task at hand, the age effect is dominant; when music-specific knowledge is needed to perform the task, the experience effect is dominant. The efficiency of older adults in remembering music through music training seems to depend on the music itself (i.e., complexity, pitch) and the type of task (i.e., short-term or long-term). Older adults generally perform worse than younger adults in short-term memory of complex, unfamiliar music and long-term memory of simple, familiar music.

In this study, researchers used "familiarity" to describe people's musical experience, and further operationalized it into two measurable dimensions: tonality (schematic memory) and novelty (veridical memory). In schimatic memory, people's familiarity with a song may be based on their familiarity with the tonality and melody direction; while in veridical memory, people remember the song firmly by memory, even if they have never been exposed to similar melodies before.

Based on these two dimensions, the researchers selected three pieces of music, including a well-known piece called "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" by Mozart, and two specially commissioned pieces for the study, one is the tonal "Pirate Waltz" and the other is the atonal "Unexpectedly Absent." "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" was used as a control piece to ensure that the participants understood the experimental process.

The research team then recruited volunteers to participate in the experiment to observe their memory performance of the three pieces of music. The experiment was conducted in two environments: live concerts and laboratories. At the concert, the research team set up in the concert hall, and participants completed questionnaires and cognitive tests before, after, or during intermissions. In the laboratory environment, participants completed the same tasks in a quiet laboratory space. The age distribution of the participants ranged from 20 to 80 years old. There were 108 participants in the live concert, and the actual average age of the participants was 46.8 years old; there were 31 participants in the laboratory, and the actual average age of the participants was 50.7 years old.

Before the experiment began, participants listened to the relevant theme three times, the first time by an orchestra and the last two times by a single person, to help them familiarize themselves with the music. Then, in the formal test, participants heard a mixed performance, including the melodies of three songs and some melodies for interference. Each participant was equipped with a clicker to respond when hearing the musical theme. Participants were required to click a button or press the space bar when they heard a specific theme in the music. The clicker sent the response time to the receiver via a wireless signal. According to the information detection theory in psychology, these response time data can be used to calculate the participants' sensitivity to the melody.

The study also designed cognitive tests and questionnaires to obtain participants' demographic information and hearing self-assessment. Based on the correlation with working memory and general cognitive function, as well as the simplicity of live concerts, the experiment selected two cognitive tests, namely the letter-number sequencing subtest and the track-making test in the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-3. The questionnaire included average years of education, weekly activity time, weekly social time, weekly music listening time, music training time, adaptive hearing screening scale, etc. For example: Have you ever been troubled by feeling that your hearing is not good? When you are in the kitchen, can you hear the sound of water boiling in the pot?

Through these data, the researchers tried to find the correlation between age, music familiarity and environmental settings. The results showed that age did not have a significant effect on music memory, and the familiarity of the music tracks and the difficulty of the music tracks themselves affected the participants' music recognition performance. When there was a control group "Serenade", the best overall performance was the serenade "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" with a familiar tonality. Excluding the control group "Serenade", there were significant differences in the participants' music recognition performance in unfamiliar tracks - tonal works ("Pirate Waltz") and atonal works ("Unexpectedly Absent"), and the tonality of the music gave the recognition advantage.

In addition, whether or not the participants had received music training slightly improved recognition performance. Participants who had received formal music training were less likely to hear irrelevant melodies as the theme melody, while participants who had received informal music training were able to identify the melody more accurately.

This study proves that in the field of music memory, the elderly perform just as well as the young. The researchers further pointed out that many studies have found that music training can also serve as a cognitive "scaffold" to improve cognitive abilities in other areas by maintaining cognitive skills during music listening. This provides a scientific basis for music rehabilitation and music training for the elderly.