Recognition memory in movie scenes: the soundtrack induces mood-coherent bias, but not through mood induction

ABSTRACT

Several studies have employed music to affect various tasks through mood induction procedures. In this perspective, music’s emotional content coherently affects the listeners’ mood, which, in turn, affects performance. On the contrary, in film music cognition, schema theories suggest that music adds semantic information that interacts with the viewers’ previous knowledge and influences visual information processing. As in this interpretation the viewers’ mood is not deeply considered, it is not clear the extent to which music effects are also due to its power of affecting the viewers’ mood or rather a mere cognitive priming-like influence. An experiment (N = 169) on how music biases the recognition memory of a scene was built comparing semantic and emotional effects of soundtracks differing in valence (happy vs scary) during a recognition task. The results show that 1) music affected the viewers’ mood coherently with its valence, 2) music led to falsely recognise unseen objects as truly present when coherent with the soundtrack valence; and 3) the effect of music on the biased remembering was not mediated by the viewers’ mood, thus suggesting a strong interpretation of the schema theory in film music processing. Finally, a methodological reflection is provided on the issue of the manipulation check in experiments that employ musical stimuli to assess their influence on cognition.

KEYWORDS:

• soundtrack
• audiovisual
• memory
• mood induction
• false memories
• schema theory

Author contributions

Conceptualization, A.A.; methodology, A.A.; validation, L.M. and M.M.; formal analysis, A.A.; investigation, A.A.; data curation, A.A.; writing—original draft preparation, A.A.; writing—review and editing, A.A. and M.M.; supervision, L.M. and I.P. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Data availability statement

The questionnaire and the data supporting this study's findings are available in OSF at https://osf.io/n4bc2/?view_only=041bac11842f4f8baf96f84654a50005.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 A specification on the use of the terms mood and emotion throughout the paper: when we deal with the induction paradigm, we always use the term mood, as this is what music is certainly able to induce: a vague and rough mood, positive or negative, very seldom a precise emotion. When we refer to more detailed emotional nuances represented by the music (as in the case of the soundtracks that we used: scary vs. happy), we use the term emotion. An emotion can surely be represented by the music, but fairly rarely induced. More specifically, many pieces of music are representative of certain emotions that can be conveyed and decodified via psychoacoustic cues (Eerola et al., 2013; Quinto et al., 2014).

2 Sometimes, for reasons of brevity, we use the term recall to differentiate it from encoding; nevertheless, strictly speaking, given that the participants are provided with cues that help them in retrieving the information, we should always be referring to recognition memory.

3 An anti-ballot box stuffing was employed in order to avoid multiple participants from the same device.