Massimo Grassi

Musical expertise and cognitive abilities: no advantage for professionals over amateurs Abstract. Cognitive advantages in musicians are often attributed to far transfer from music training. If this causal interpretation is correct, greater mus

Sometimes I remember that I have a bluesky account ;)

I'm very happy to share our last paper, investigating how cognitive skills relate to different levels of musical expertise:

url: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

@cesarflima.bsky.social @masssimo006.bsky.social

Learning to play a musical instrument is often assumed to improve brain functioning & cognition. To test this, a new #RSOS study compared non-musicians, amateur & professional #musicians: doi.org/10.1098/rsos... @francescatalamini.bsky.social @cesarflima.bsky.social @masssimo006.bsky.social

New version of tenzing, with support for acknowledgments sections, is now live at tenzing.club. Please try to break it, @martonkovacs.bsky.social has already fixed all the errors I found!

Do Musicians Have Better Short-Term Memory Than Non-musicians? Anne-Caclin, Ragnya-Norasoa Souffiane, et Marie-Elisabeth Plasse from the PAM team contributed to this multilab study ! @francescatalamini.bsky.social @masssimo006.bsky.social

I'm reading an old, classic psychoacoustic experiment (N=3). It is written by 3 authors, and 2 are also subjects. In the procedure authors write: "Subjects [...] were encouraged to "bracket" the match before making the final adjustment".

I'm wondering how authors were encouraging themselves.

A jerk here on Bluesky. On LinkedIn no mentions about the person.

Check out this really cool multilab project about the difference in short-term memory between musicians and non-musicians! By @masssimo006.bsky.social, @francescatalamini.bsky.social, and researchers from 33 institutions around the world.

Proceedings of LLEAHMM 2024 This book gathers the refereed proceedings of the 1st International Conference Logistics & Lean Engineering for Advanced Healthcare Methodologies Modelling

The game is: look if there is any recurrent name among the authors, and among the references.
link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Well, even with zero errors in the count of citations, I have some nice example of Springer proceedings (Scopus indexed) in which citation count for some author produces quite shocking numbers.

Fantastic display of collaboration in #musicpsych!!

Do Musicians Have Better Short-Term Memory Than Nonmusicians? A Multilab Study - Massimo Grassi, Francesca Talamini, Gianmarco Altoè, Elvira Brattico, Anne Caclin, Barbara Carretti, Véronique Drai-Zer... Musicians are often regarded as a positive example of brain plasticity and associated cognitive benefits. This emerges when experienced musicians (e.g., musicia...

Finally, our 4-year long project has been published! We have conducted a multi-lab study comparing STM of musicians and nonmusicians, collecting many other cognitive, personality, musical, and demographic variables!
A big thank you to all collaborators!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I do not understand why the link to the paper is so persistent! :-D

But I like it! 🙌

Do Musicians Have Better Short-Term Memory Than Nonmusicians? A Multilab Study - Massimo Grassi, Francesca Talamini, Gianmarco Altoè, Elvira Brattico, Anne Caclin, Barbara Carretti, Véronique Drai-Zer... Musicians are often regarded as a positive example of brain plasticity and associated cognitive benefits. This emerges when experienced musicians (e.g., musicia...

But I really hope large collaborations like the following and others that are emerging in this period will change the way we embrace science: from competition to collaboration.

The paper is here:
doi.org/10.1177/2515...
The OSF project to access the rest is here:
osf.io/y97t3/overview

Do Musicians Have Better Short-Term Memory Than Nonmusicians? A Multilab Study - Massimo Grassi, Francesca Talamini, Gianmarco Altoè, Elvira Brattico, Anne Caclin, Barbara Carretti, Véronique Drai-Zer... Musicians are often regarded as a positive example of brain plasticity and associated cognitive benefits. This emerges when experienced musicians (e.g., musicia...

I will not discuss the results here because large collaborations often do not converge on common views as far as interpreting data and results is concerned (data last! opinions change!).

Do Musicians Have Better Short-Term Memory Than Nonmusicians? A Multilab Study - Massimo Grassi, Francesca Talamini, Gianmarco Altoè, Elvira Brattico, Anne Caclin, Barbara Carretti, Véronique Drai-Zer... Musicians are often regarded as a positive example of brain plasticity and associated cognitive benefits. This emerges when experienced musicians (e.g., musicia...

No need to say that everything (data, materials, the whole research protocol) is open, transparent, and ready to be reproduced and replicated. Top! Top! Top!

Do Musicians Have Better Short-Term Memory Than Nonmusicians? A Multilab Study - Massimo Grassi, Francesca Talamini, Gianmarco Altoè, Elvira Brattico, Anne Caclin, Barbara Carretti, Véronique Drai-Zer... Musicians are often regarded as a positive example of brain plasticity and associated cognitive benefits. This emerges when experienced musicians (e.g., musicia...

I had the pleasure and the chance to coordinate this fantastic group of colleagues with Francesca Talamini. And I tell you: if you ever have the chance to be involved with large collaborations, there is no way back: this is how science should be done (IMO).

Do Musicians Have Better Short-Term Memory Than Nonmusicians? A Multilab Study - Massimo Grassi, Francesca Talamini, Gianmarco Altoè, Elvira Brattico, Anne Caclin, Barbara Carretti, Véronique Drai-Zer... Musicians are often regarded as a positive example of brain plasticity and associated cognitive benefits. This emerges when experienced musicians (e.g., musicia...

Altogether, we conducted an in-lab, in-person study investigating whether playing a musical instrument is associated with better short-term memory performance and other cognitive benefits, whether expert musicians have better short-term memory than nonmusicians.

Do Musicians Have Better Short-Term Memory Than Nonmusicians? A Multilab Study - Massimo Grassi, Francesca Talamini, Gianmarco Altoè, Elvira Brattico, Anne Caclin, Barbara Carretti, Véronique Drai-Zer... Musicians are often regarded as a positive example of brain plasticity and associated cognitive benefits. This emerges when experienced musicians (e.g., musicia...

This work is the result of the joint effort of 110 colleagues over 4 years, the first multilab in psychology and neuroscience of music.

Do Musicians Have Better Short-Term Memory Than Nonmusicians? A Multilab Study - Massimo Grassi, Francesca Talamini, Gianmarco Altoè, Elvira Brattico, Anne Caclin, Barbara Carretti, Véronique Drai-Zer... Musicians are often regarded as a positive example of brain plasticity and associated cognitive benefits. This emerges when experienced musicians (e.g., musicia...

Finally out!
Do musicians have better short-term memory than nonmusicians? This is what we investigated in a multilab that joined together 33 research units from 15 different countries.

Let aside the absurdity of the request, 3d graphs are difficult to read (IMO). In the past, if one of the variables was suitable for the change, I was expressing one axis with color (greyscale).

Rice is already taken, I go for wheat (durum, wheat of course, 😀).

I do not understand where is the news :-|

In Italy, it is common practice in many fields (eg medicine) that the PI is last author "by default".

@martonkovacs.bsky.social is beavering away implementing something new for tenzing.club. We hope to make it easier for you to manage your collaborators, by also providing for acknowledgees (people you acknowledge but who aren't co-authors)!

Definitely! For example, in Italy traditional metrics are often taken at face value! 😱. A person with 2N citations is assumed to be twice as good as someone with N citations, even if the first works in neuroscience within a team and the second in the history of neuroscience on his own.

Contemporary multilabs challenge the first/last/rest ternary view. But definitely, a more complex metric keeps into account more dimensions.

I guess you know the early films by Dario Argento. If you do not, look for them. Another Italian classic of the seventies is The House with Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono).

Does this happen in your country (Italy here)? Do you receive communications from the head of the university that include sentences such as "working actively for the continuous improvement of" teaching, research or dissemination. Which is usually translated into a set of nonsense numerical indexes?

Updating my LEGO White House

Why you simply do not credit them for writing?
I know many journals ask that all authors are credited with writing, but I think this can be contracted with the journal.