Individual differences in learning and remembering music: Auditory versus visual presentation

Educators often seek the most efficient method for teaching new material without giving much thought to the student's personal learning style preferences. This is also true in beginning music classes, where learning-preference-specific instruction may be more beneficial. The present experiments examined the effect of presentation modality (visual or auditory) and learning style preference on people's ability to learn and remember unfamiliar melodies and sentences. In addition, within this context, we were interested the effect of expertise on learning efficiency and memory for meaningful and less meaningful melodies and sentences. Thus, Experiment 1 investigated musicians' and non-musicians' learning efficiency for meaningful and less meaningful musical as well as verbal materials when presented visually or auditorily. Experiment 2 extended the exploration of the effect of the same variables from learning to the domain of memory. Findings reveal that learning style preferences do, in fact, affect people's learning efficiency and memory for both music and sentences. Visual learners learn visually presented items faster than auditorily presented ones and remember them better, the reverse being true for auditory learners. In addition, as expected, meaningful melodies and sentences are learned faster than less meaningful ones. Moreover, experts (musicians) learned meaningful melodies faster than less meaningful melodies as well as remember them better, but non-experts (non-musicians) showed no differences with regard to meaningfulness of the melodies.