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Background: A common complaint in older adults is trouble with their memory, especially for new information. Current knowledge about normal aging and changes in memory identify a divide between memory tasks that are unaffected by aging and those that are. Among the unaffected are recognition tasks. These memory tasks rely on accessing well-known information, often include environmental support, and tend to be automatic. Negative age effects on memory are often observed at both encoding and during recall. Older adults often have difficulty with recall tasks, particularly those that require effortful self-initiated processing, episodic memory, and retention of information about contextual cues. Research in memory for music in healthy aging suggests a skill-invariance hypothesis: that age effects dominate when general-purpose cognitive mechanisms are needed to perform the musical task at hand, while experience effects dominate when music-specific knowledge is needed to perform the task [1]. Aims: The goals of this pair of studies were to investigate the effects of age and familiarity on musical memory in the context of real pieces of music, and to compare a live concert experimental setting with a lab-based experimental setting. Method: Participants' task was to click a button (or press the spacebar) when they heard the target theme in three pieces of music. One was Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and the others were original pieces commissioned for this study, one tonal and one atonal. Participants heard the relevant theme three times before listening to a piece of music. The music was performed by the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra; participants either attended the concert, or watched a recording of the concert in the lab. Participants also completed two short cognitive tests and filled out a questionnaire collecting demographic information and a hearing abilities self-assessment. Results: We find a significant effect of familiarity and setting but not of age or musical training on recognition performance as measured by d'. More specifically, performance is best for the familiar, tonal piece, moderate for the unfamiliar tonal piece and worst for the unfamiliar atonal piece. Performance was better in the live setting than the lab setting. Conclusions: The absence of an age effect provides encouraging evidence that music's diverse cues may encourage cognitive scaffolding, in turn improving encoding and subsequent recognition. Better performance in an ecological versus lab setting supports the expansion of ecological studies in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Familiarity with sound sources is known to have a modulatory effect on auditory distance perception. However, the level of familiarity that can affect distance perception is not clearly understood. A subjective experiment that aims to investigate the effects of interpersonal familiarity on auditory distance perception with level-equalized stimuli is reported. The experiment involves a binaural listening task where different source distances between 0.5 and 16 m were emulated by convolving dry speech signals with measured binaural room impulse responses. The experimental paradigm involved level-equalized stimuli comprising speech signals recorded from different-gender couples who have self-reported to have known each other for more than a year with daily interaction. Each subject judged the distances of a total of 15 different speech stimuli from their partner as well as spectrally most similar and most dissimilar strangers, for six different emulated distances. The main finding is that a similar but unfamiliar speaker is localized to be further away than a familiar speaker. Another finding is that the semantic properties of speech can potentially have a modulating effect on auditory distance judgements.