The effects of age and experience on memory for visually presented music

Increased age is often associated with lower levels of performance in tests of memory for spatial information. The pri-mary question in the current study was whether this relationship could be moderated as a function of one's relevant experience and/or knowledge. Stimulus materials consisted of short (7-11 note), visually presented musical melodies and structurally equivalent nonmusical stimuli. Participants (N = 128) were recruited from a wide range of age and experience levels. Although there were strong main effects of age and experience on memory for music, there was no evidence that the age-related differences in memory for these stimuli were smaller for individuals with moderate to large amounts of experience with music. ONE important question in the aging literature that has yetto result in a definite answer concerns the relations among age, experience, and performance on domain-relevant tasks. Although age effects in the direction of lower performance in older adults have been reported on many types of memory tasks (see Smith, 1996; Craik & Jennings, 1992, for reviews) and other cognitive tasks (see Craik & Salthouse, 1992; Blanchard-Fields & Hess, 1996, for reviews), the positive ef-fects of experience on domain-relevant tasks might be ex