Effects of musical training and articulatory suppression on true and false associative memory.

A number of studies propose a link between music training and the enhancement of cognitive abilities including verbal memory. This association has been attributed to the increased use of verbal rehearsal in musicians. This current study investigated this line of research and the interaction of verbal rehearsal on true and false memory recall. Twenty musical and twenty non-musical students who were recruited by opportunity sampling, participated independently in the DRM procedure, which involved memorising 12 computerised word-lists. During six of the lists, all participants were required to perform an articulatory suppression task. In line with the hypothesis, it was found that musical participants did recall more true memories. However, contrary to the hypothesis, articulatory suppression did not increase musical participants’ recall of critical lures significantly more than non-musical participants. Together these results show that musical training does exert a benefit on true memory recall, however, the effect does not extend to false memory recall. Therefore, the effects of musical training are more general than the enhancement of verbal memory. Possible explanations for these results are discussed