Zatorre R J, Beckett C
Mem Cognit. 1989 Sep;17(5):582-9. doi: 10.3758/bf03197081.
Eighteen musicians with absolute pitch (AP) confirmed by screening tests participated in tonal and verbal short-term-retention tasks. In the tonal task, subjects identified three successive piano tones by their letter names. Recall of these note names after 18 sec of counting backwards was near perfect. Recall after an 18-sec delay filled with random piano tones was also near perfect. In contrast, the same subjects demonstrated significant forgetting when required to retain letter trigrams while counting backwards for 18 sec. These results were essentially replicated in a second experiment using longer (27 sec) retention intervals, a more demanding verbal interference task, and an active musical interference task (singing a descending scale). We interpret these results as indicating that retention of note names by possessors of AP is not limited to verbal encoding; rather, multiple codes (e.g., auditory, kinesthetic, and visual imagery) are probably used.
18名通过筛选测试确认具有绝对音高（AP）的音乐家参与了音调及言语短期记忆任务。在音调任务中，受试者根据字母名称识别连续的三个钢琴音调。在倒着数18秒后，对这些音符名称的回忆几乎完美。在充满随机钢琴音调的18秒延迟后，回忆同样几乎完美。相比之下，当要求相同的受试者在倒着数18秒的同时记住字母三字母组时，表现出明显的遗忘。这些结果在第二个实验中基本得到重复，该实验使用了更长（27秒）的记忆间隔、要求更高的言语干扰任务以及一个主动的音乐干扰任务（唱下行音阶）。我们将这些结果解释为表明具有绝对音高者对音符名称的记忆不限于言语编码；相反，可能使用了多种编码（例如，听觉、动觉和视觉意象）。
