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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Name: Yiren Ren
Master’s Thesis Defense Meeting
Date: Tuesday, May 25, 2021
Time: 1:00pm
Location: https://bluejeans.com/316033940
Advisor: Thackery Brown, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Thesis Committee members:
Thackery Brown, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Audrey Duarte, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Grace Leslie, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Title: Cross-Modal Schema Effect of Music Pairing on Shape Sequence Acquisition
Abstract: Music is a multidimensional sequence of pitches and temporal intervals that has a predictable structure over time. Prior literature has revealed that humans are innately equipped to learn and anticipate these pitches and intervals. Because of the important role music plays in humans' daily lives, learning how music interacts with other cognitive processes would help future utilization of music in clinical or applied ways. Though many studies have tested how to use music as a tool to improve other cognitive functions, fewer studies have investigated how music potentially affects memory encoding for information other than the music itself. This question is worth investigating, given music’s regular structure and frequent presence in the background while we study or simply experience our daily lives. Schema theory has shown that new information that is related to a learned memory structure can be encoded and learned faster, although this has never been directly tested, to the best of our knowledge, in the context of the learned structure being music. Thus, this study aimed to apply schema theory using an association between musical sequence properties and the workload required for parallel visual item sequence encoding – in doing so, I tested whether listening to familiar and regular music provided a "temporal schema" through its organized and hierarchical structure that has a cross-modal influence on the acquisition of other (here: visual) mnemonic information. Consistent with my hypotheses, the results revealed an interactive effect of music familiarity and music regularity on parallel visual sequential learning. While listening to music may improve or distract from parallel memory encoding in various circumstances, this study not only provided novel evidence that music regularity and familiarity were both factors determining the music’s influence, but also implied that music’s effect on memory might depend on other individual differences factors.
