Do you remember that top hit from your favorite 90s boy band that you listened to on your CD player in 4th grade? Now can you recall that song on the radio that you listened to last week while driving to Colby College on I-95? Chances are, you will remember every last word of that pop song from a decade ago, but you cannot remember anything about that song you heard very recently while driving past endless pine trees. It may seem counter intuitive that certain songs from the distant past are ingrained in memory much better than the latest hits. However, past research has shown that memory and emotion are closely linked, and memory can be enhanced when correlated with powerful emotions (Laird et al., 1982). Music can be an effective catalyst in eliciting strong emotion, and people use music as a way to derive emotional responses. For example, people listen to upbeat and lively music when they want to socialize at parties, and movies play sad, slow music in a minor key during tragic moments. To examine whether emotion can have an effect on the ability to remember songs, Stephanie M. Stalinski and E. Gleen Schellenberg, investigated whether \u201cliking\u201d a song is correlated with the ability to remember it at a later point in time.<\/p>\n
In their paper \u201cListeners Remember Music They Like,\u201d Stalinski and Schellenberg hypothesized that positive musical experiences would influence later recognition. It is difficult to conduct experiments on music and memory because everyone has differences in musical preference. For example, someone who likes country music may remember an excerpt better if it sounds like a country song. Therefore, the scientists conducted six experiments to rule out any confounding variables as a result of music preference and familiarity with songs.
\nIn each experiment they gathered 48-86 undergraduate students with normal hearing and varying degrees of musical training to listen to short pieces of music which they had not previously heard. After a delay of either 10 minutes or 24 hours, participants had to rate each song along a continuum for \u201cliking\u201d and \u201crecognition\u201d (whether they had heard the piece previously). For each test they removed participants who had heard the music prior to the experiment so that they could isolate \u201cliking\u201d based only upon novel music. Each experiment isolated a different factor which could influence music preference and recognition, such as the complexity of the music, familiarity of genre, processing of lyrics, or recognition of music tested in the prior experiment.
\nIn all experiments, subjects were able to recognize more musical pieces that they rated as favorable. This was true regardless of the time delay after the first listening, their ability to distinguish between actually \u201cliking\u201d or simply \u201crecognizing\u201d a piece, the similarity of the song to their favorite genres, the deep-level processing required to understand the lyrics, and previous exposure to the song in the same testing environment. This shows that memory for music is consistently and intimately tied with peoples\u2019 emotions and attitudes towards a piece.
\nThis study can help us to understand why we can easily remember our favorite songs from our youth, while we can forget more easily the neutral or unpleasant songs for which we show little regard. The experiments discussed in this paper are also helpful to realize why a good tune can become \u201cstuck in your head\u201d for hours. However, it does not explain why the same phenomenon can happen to songs that are strongly disliked. Future experiments could help to determine whether negative emotions can also have a strong effect on memory for music. Additional studies could also isolate how songs that we associate with certain memories can help in recall of past emotionally charged events. For now, the next time you are caught singing along to \u201cBye Bye Bye,\u201d you can explain that your emotional attachment to N\u2019Sync at the age of ten is responsible for your perfect memory of the lyrics today.<\/p>\n
References: Do you remember that top hit from your favorite 90s boy band that you listened to on your CD player in 4th grade? Now can you recall that song on the radio that you listened to last week while driving to Colby College on I-95? Chances are, you will remember every last word of that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2469,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80215],"tags":[117417,129795,45],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2469"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":938,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions\/938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nLaird, James D.; Waegner, John; Halal, Mark; Szegda, Martha. (1982). Remembering What You Feel: Effects of Emotion on Memory<\/a>. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42<\/em>, 646-657.
\nStalinski, S. M. & Schellenberg, E.G. (2013). Listeners Remember Music They Like<\/a>. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 39<\/em>, 700-716. doi:10.1037,a0029671<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"