Reyna and Brainerd (1995) posit a “fuzzy-trace theory,” att ributing two sepa-rate kinds of mental representations to people: verbatim traces and gist traces.
Verbatim traces record surface details, but gist traces bypass the surface and encode the underlying semantic content. Gist traces more frequently form the basis for reasoning. In a series of papers, notably Brainerd and Kingma (1984), these authors and their colleagues showed that children were able to perform well on reasoning tasks even when their memory for the specifi cs of the initial premise information had degraded. Th is disassociation between surface retrieval and reasoning ability led to the notion that verbatim and gist information are encoded separately, and stored in parallel. Th e verbatim trace decays rapidly, but the gist trace can last for long periods of time (Brainerd & Reyna, 1996).
When asked to recall a story or a sentence, people oft en paraphrase, refl ecting a tendency toward gist over verbatim memory (Gernsbacher, 1985). Elementary school students asked to retell the gist of a story were more fl uent and used fewer and shorter pauses than students asked to retell it verbatim (Schoenpfl ug, 2008). Field (2004) observes in a survey of the literature that it “appears that listeners and readers jett ison surface form as soon as possible in favour of a more easily stored conceptual representation” (p. 319). Hunter (1984) claims not only that people lack the kind of memory that would allow them to reproduce prose verbatim, but also that they lack the kind of memory that would allow them to recognize whether a reproduction was verbatim in the fi rst place. In his assessment, it wasn’t until the technology of writt en text emerged that this kind of reckoning became possible. He terms the inability to accurately distinguish
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whether a speech, saga, or story actually constitutes a word-for-word repetition of its previous telling “verbatim insensitivity.”
Although older children are adult-like in the sense that they employ a pre-dominantly gist-based memory, young children rely primarily on verbatim memory (Reyna and Brainerd, 1995). In what I would argue constitutes a behav-ioral refl ection of this cognitive diff erence, children crave repetition—they want to hear the same stories again and again, and will oft en protest vehemently if specifi c words are omitt ed or altered. Th ese twin qualities—enhanced verbatim memory and elevated appetite for repetition—also characterize responses in adulthood to a particular domain: music.
Calvert (1991) and Calvert and Tart (1993) examined how changing whether information was presented in spoken or sung form aff ected the accuracy of gist and verbatim memory. Sung information elicited bett er verbatim recall, but spo-ken information elicited bett er gist recall. Th is parallels previous fi ndings that children’s verbatim recall for nursery rhymes—a category as music-like as text gets—surpasses their verbatim recall for prose passages ( Johnson & Hayes, 1987), but their content recall for nursery rhymes lags behind their content recall for prose passages (Hayes, Chemelski & Palmer, 1982). Children’s mem-ory for educational material presented during the television program School House Rock followed the same patt ern: songs improved verbatim memory, but spoken presentations improved comprehension of content (Calvert, 2001).
Wallace (1994) showed that singing a text rather than speaking it also improved verbatim recall in adults. More recently, Tillmann & Dowling (2007) and Dowling, Tillmann & Ayers (2001) adapted a paradigm from an early study that demonstrated poor verbatim memory for linguistic sentences (Sachs, 1967) to study verbatim memory for music. Th eir work revealed that verbatim memory for musical phrases, in contrast to linguistic sentences, was quite good and not subject to the same kind of deterioration over time.
Th e comparison between memory traces for language and for music only holds if the paradigms used to study them each are deeply similar. Sachs pre-sented people with a short story and asked them to distinguish between a sen-tence drawn from early in the narrative and various foils. Foils came in two varieties: entirely novel sentences (featuring both diff erent words and diff erent meanings than any found in the story), and paraphrases (sentences with diff er-ent words but the same meaning as some found in the story). Increasing tem-poral delay between the story presentation and the task led to increasingly poor performance in discriminating the original from the paraphrase. Temporal delay did not, however, damage performance in discriminating the original from a dif-ferent sentence. Participants remembered the gist of what had been recounted, and could easily identify when a sentence featured a meaning diff erent from any found in the story. Th ey couldn’t, however, recall surface detail—a paraphrase of
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an original sentence was as likely to be identifi ed as belonging to the story as the actual sentence with the original wording.
In the Dowling studies, listeners heard a minuet from the classical period and were asked to discriminate a target phrase from near the beginning of the piece from either an entirely new phrase or a similar lure that preserved the melodic and rhythmic contour but changed the pitch level or texture. Even with increas-ing delay, participants remained good at distincreas-inguishincreas-ing the original phrase not only from the diff erent one, but also from the similar lure. Th eir memory, in other words, was quite verbatim in nature, linked to specifi c att ributes of the original stimulus, rather than to its gist. Th e Sachs studies on speech and the Dowling studies on music preserve elements of experimental design as much as possible given the diff ering natures of the material, lending credence to the notion that their contrasting results expose a real contrast in mental representation.
What accounts for this diff erence in the nature of musical and linguistic mem-ory? Gernsbacher (1985) suggests that as a writt en story unfolds, readers build substructures in order to integrate information, sustaining all the relevant details in working memory until a point of closure. At this point, all the surface informa-tion is discarded so that a new substructure can be initiated; only the thematic content, which continues to be relevant, is held in mind. Field (2004) reviews a number of studies that provide evidence that people jett ison verbatim content at structural boundaries (p. 318). It’s simply no longer relevant. Yet in musical con-texts, aspects of the surface remain relevant across closural boundaries. Motives are played with, rhythms are echoed, pitches are returned to. Th e prevalence of musical repetition underscores the importance of the surface. Musicians oft en speak about repetition in didactic terms: repetition teaches the listener what the basic materials of the piece are. Repetition tells the listener what will constitute the piece’s basic idea—not what gist-like point should be derived from this idea, but rather what the idea itself is , at its surface.
Tillmann and Dowling (2007) show that memory for the surface details of a particular phrase decreased across delays for phrases embedded within a prose story, but not for phrases embedded within a poem. Th is fi nding parallels that of Dowling, Tillman & Ayers (2001), which showed that delays did not dimin-ish memory for the surface details of musical phrases embedded within larger pieces. In fact, delays not only failed to diminish verbatim memory for poetry and music, but also actually resulted in fewer false alarms to the similar lure.
Time seemed to allow for a bett er representation of the phrase’s specifi c details, making it easier to distinguish from phrases constructed to be similar in gist.
Th is trend represents not just an absence of the one found for prose, but actu-ally its opposite. Krumhansl (2010), moreover, has shown that listeners can identify the emotional tenor, style, decade of release, and even artist and title from extremely brief 400 ms clips of songs popular between 1960 and 2010. Th e
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information in these clips oft en contains no more than a kind of grain or timbral confi guration and includes none of the elements typically considered essential to a piece of music’s identity: the sequence of notes constituting its theme, the rhythmic progression constituting its temporal signature, the harmonic unfold-ing constitutunfold-ing its basic structure. Th e clips convey only a verbatim snippet, and this scant information is suffi cient to trigger surprisingly sophisticated kinds of recognition, contributing further evidence to the unique relevance of verbatim representations to music.
Th e relationship between poetry and music has been variously explored, overstated, and backed away from (for a contemporary account with a percep-tual bent, see Lerdahl, 2001). Tillmann and Dowling att ribute the shared patt ern of verbatim recollection for poetry and music to the joint use of rhythmic and temporal features (such as rhyme and meter) that limit the possibilities for word choice and thus enhance memory for the original words. Whatever the mecha-nism, this investment in the surface makes repetition more likeable in poetry and music; repetition, in contrast to variation, repositions before the listener precisely the thing the listener is to care about: the phrase itself (Hatt en refers to the “irreducible signifi cance of the surface” (1994, p. 160). But in prose, where the investment is in the meaning , restatement in diff erent words might get the listener closer to what matt ers, while verbatim repetition might mire them in the surface, a distraction from the intended semantic essence. Th e phenomenon of semantic satiation chronicled in Chapter 1 exemplifi es this danger; verbatim repetition draws att ention down to the component phonemes, or lett ers, or notes—something unwelcome in many prose contexts but desirable in types of music and poetry.
Aside from poetry, verbatim memory for language is also enhanced when the utt erance has high interactional content, as in a joke, insult or catchphrase (as opposed to a transactional, informative statement). In these cases, words serve more clearly as a kind of action, a parry or riposte, and memory for the words represents memory for the action rather than for some encoded semantic association. Th e rhythm and temporal structure explanation fails with regard to enhanced verbatim memory for jokes and insults; although some sorts of jokes possess this kind of structure, insults as a rule do not. Th eir verbatim memorabil-ity may be enhanced when such a structure is invoked (“ Jun ie and Jon ny sit tin’
in a tree ”), but this structure itself doesn’t seem to provide a full account of the verbatim boost for this kind of utt erance.
High verbatim memory, rather than (or in addition to) benefi ting from tempo-ral structure, seems to refl ect an implicit commitment to the idea that something valuable resides in the surface content. It can be taken as an index of the value assigned to the actual details of the stimulus over and above some abstract content for which those details serve as a vessel. Just as the signifi cance of a poem oft en
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resides in specifi c word choices and their nuanced associations and connotations, as well as in their interrelationship, the signifi cance of an insult oft en resides in the specifi c word choice and the timbral nuances used to utt er it. Th ese elements are the most resistant to conceptual capture, and thus benefi t most from repetition.