Effects of familiar music exposure on deliberate retrieval of remote episodic and semantic memories in healthy aging adults

ABSTRACT

Familiar music facilitates memory retrieval in adults with dementia. However, mechanisms behind this effect, and its generality, are unclear because of a lack of parallel work in healthy aging. Exposure to familiar music enhances spontaneous recall of memories directly cued by the music, but it is unknown whether such effects extend to deliberate recall more generally – e.g., to memories not directly linked to the music being played. It is also unclear whether familiar music boosts recall of specific episodes versus more generalised semantic memories, or whether effects are driven by domain-general mechanisms (e.g., improved mood). In a registered report study, we examined effects of familiar music on deliberate recall in healthy adults ages 65–80 years (N = 75) by presenting familiar music from earlier in life, unfamiliar music, and non-musical audio clips across three sessions. After each clip, we assessed free recall of remote memories for pre-selected events. Contrary to our hypotheses, we found no effects of music exposure on recall of prompted events, though familiar music evoked spontaneous memories most often. These results suggest that effects of familiar music on recall may be limited to memories specifically evoked in response to the music (Preprint and registered report protocol at https://osf.io/kjnwd/).

KEYWORDS:

• Familiar music
• recall
• episodic
• semantic
• autobiographical

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants for contributing their time and energy to this study. We also thank Amaesha Durazi, Nicolas Camacho, Monica Thieu, Carina Fan, R.B., and the DANLAB and Alyssano groups for their contributions and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Deidentified data are available at https://osf.io/56khe/. A self-contained computing environment with both data and code for reproducing the main analyses is also available on Code Ocean at https://codeocean.com/capsule/9974540/tree/v1

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship to PAB (DGE 1644869) and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to MA (BCS-1844241).