Abstract
Music listening is one of the most pleasurable activities in our life. As a rewarding stimulus, pleasant music could induce long-term memory improvements for the items encoded in close temporal proximity. In the present study, we behaviourally investigated (1) whether musical pleasure and musical hedonia enhance verbal episodic memory, and (2) whether such enhancement takes place even when the pleasant stimulus is not present during the encoding. Participants (N = 100) were asked to encode words presented in different auditory contexts (highly and lowly pleasant classical music, and control white noise), played before and during (N = 49), or only before (N = 51) the encoding. The Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire was used to measure participants’ sensitivity to musical reward. 24 h later, participants’ verbal episodic memory was tested (old/new recognition and remember/know paradigm). Results revealed that participants with a high musical reward sensitivity present an increased recollection performance, especially for words encoded in a highly pleasant musical context. Furthermore, this effect persists even when the auditory stimulus is not concurrently present during the encoding of target items. Taken together, these findings suggest that musical pleasure might constitute a helpful encoding context able to drive memory improvements via reward mechanisms.
Highlights
And in line with a wide range of literature showing the importance of emotional significant experiences in memory[25] and learning[26,27], recent research has shown that reward is intimately related to memory processing[11,28,29,30]
No significant differences in memory performance, musical hedonia, general hedonia, classical music liking, classical music exposure or musical expertise were found between the two groups that performed the different versions of the task
In the present study we investigated whether musical reward, and pleasant musical material and individuals’ musical hedonia, modulate verbal long-term memory
Summary
In line with a wide range of literature showing the importance of emotional significant experiences in memory[25] and learning[26,27], recent research has shown that reward is intimately related to memory processing[11,28,29,30]. Being music a rewarding stimulus triggering dopamine r elease[21], it is possible that its positive effect on memory might be at least partially related to the pleasurable responses it triggers[43] In line with this hypothesis, Ferreri & Rodriguez-Fornells showed that unfamiliar classical music excerpts rated as more pleasant during encoding were significantly better recognized and remembered the day[44]. The main aim of the present study was, to determine whether music-driven reward can modulate episodic verbal memory performance for associated items present in the encoding context To investigate this issue, participants encoded lists of real words in three different auditory contexts: highly pleasant music, lowly pleasant music and white noise. According to the penumbra-BT hypothesis, we might expect memory performance enhancement driven by music reward to show no significant differences between these two experimental versions
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