Serial position effects in a singer's long term recall identify landmarks and lacunae in memory

2009

An experienced singer learned Stravinsky’s Ricercar 1, for soprano and small instrumental ensemble for public performance and annotated copies of the score to indicate the location of musical features that she attended to during practice and performance cues that she attended to during performance. During the next five years, she wrote out the words and music from memory six times. Recall was initially perfect, but declined over time as portions of the piece were progressively forgotten. Landmarks in recall were marked by a sharp increase in the probability of recall followed by a gradual, linear decrease as the serial cuing of successive bars broke down. Landmarks occurred at important poi…