Short-term memory has mostly been investigated with verbal or visuospatial stimuli and less so with other categories of stimuli. Moreover, the influence of sensory modality has been explored almost solely in the verbal domain. The present study compared visual and auditory short-term memory for different types of materials, aiming to understand whether sensory modality and material type can influence short-term memory performance. Furthermore, we aimed to assess if music expertise can modulate memory performance, as previous research has reported better auditory memory (and to some extent, visual memory), and better auditory contour recognition for musicians than non-musicians. To do so, we adapted the same recognition paradigm (delayed-matching to sample) across different types of stimuli. In each trial, participants (musicians and non-musicians) were presented with two sequences of events, separated by a silent delay, and had to indicate whether the two sequences were identical or different. The performance was compared for auditory and visual materials belonging to three different categories: (1) verbal (i.e., syllables); (2) nonverbal (i.e., that could not be easily denominated) with contour (based on loudness or luminance variations); and (3) nonverbal without contour (pink noise sequences or kanji letters sequences). Contour and no-contour conditions referred to whether the sequence can entail (or not) a contour (i.e., a pattern of up and down changes) based on non-pitch features. Results revealed a selective advantage of musicians for auditory no-contour stimuli and for contour stimuli (both visual and auditory), suggesting that musical expertise is associated with specific short-term memory advantages in domains close to the trained domain, also extending cross-modally when stimuli have contour information. Moreover, our results suggest a role of encoding strategies (i.e., how the material is represented mentally during the task) for short-term-memory performance.

短期记忆主要通过语言或视觉空间刺激进行研究，而其他类别的刺激则较少。此外，几乎只在语言领域探索了感觉形态的影响。本研究比较了不同类型材料的视觉和听觉短期记忆，旨在了解感觉形态和材料类型是否会影响短期记忆表现。此外，我们的目的是评估音乐专业知识是否可以调节记忆表现，因为先前的研究报告说，音乐家比非音乐家更好的听觉记忆（在某种程度上，视觉记忆）和更好的听觉轮廓识别。为此，我们在不同类型的刺激中采用了相同的识别范式（延迟匹配样本）。在每次试验中，参与者（音乐家和非音乐家）被呈现给两个事件序列，由一个无声的延迟分开，并且必须指出这两个序列是相同的还是不同的。对属于三个不同类别的听觉和视觉材料的性能进行了比较：（1）口头（即音节）；(2) 带有轮廓（基于响度或亮度变化）的非语言（即不容易命名的）；(3) 没有轮廓的非语言（粉红噪声序列或汉字字母序列）。等高线和非等高线条件是指序列是否可以包含（或不包括）基于非音高特征的等高线（即上下变化的模式）。结果揭示了音乐家对听觉无轮廓刺激和轮廓刺激（视觉和听觉）的选择性优势，表明音乐专业知识与接近训练领域的特定短期记忆优势相关，当刺激具有轮廓信息时，也会跨模态扩展。此外，我们的结果表明编码策略（即，材料在任务期间如何在心理上表示）对短期记忆表现的作用。