Music is strongly intertwined with memories-for example, hearing a song from the past can transport you back in time, triggering the sights, sounds, and feelings of a specific event. This association between music and vivid autobiographical memory is intuitively apparent, but the idea that music is intimately tied with memories, seemingly more so than other potent memory cues (e.g., familiar faces), has not been empirically tested. Here, we compared memories evoked by music to those evoked by famous faces, predicting that music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) would be more vivid. Participants listened to 30 songs, viewed 30 faces, and reported on memories that were evoked. Memories were transcribed and coded for vividness as in Levine, B., Svoboda, E., Hay, J. F., Winocur, G., & Moscovitch, M. [2002. Aging and autobiographical memory: Dissociating episodic from semantic retrieval. Psychology and Aging, 17, 677-689]. In support of our hypothesis, MEAMs were more vivid than autobiographical memories evoked by faces. MEAMs contained a greater proportion of internal details and a greater number of perceptual details, while face-evoked memories contained a greater number of external details. Additionally, we identified sex differences in memory vividness: for both stimulus categories, women retrieved more vivid memories than men. The results show that music not only effectively evokes autobiographical memories, but that these memories are more vivid than those evoked by famous faces.

Familiar music contains salient cues that often evoke vivid and emotionally powerful autobiographical memories. Prior work suggests that memories evoked by music may be different from memories evoked by other cues (e.g., words and visual images). For example, music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) have been shown to contain a greater proportion of episodic details than memories evoked by images. Neuroimaging work has suggested an important role for the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in connecting music with vivid and specific autobiographical memories. Here, we sought to investigate whether the mPFC is a necessary structure for episodically rich MEAMs, by studying individuals with damage to this region. We predicted that individuals with damage to the mPFC would have less episodically rich MEAMs than demographically matched healthy adults, but that there would not be any difference in memories evoked by images. Participants listened to popular music clips and viewed images of famous persons. After each stimulus, participants reported whether the stimulus evoked a memory; if it did, participants then verbally described the memories. Memories were recorded, transcribed, and scored to assess episodic richness. In support of our main prediction, the results indicated that the mPFC group performed significantly lower than the comparison group for music-evoked, but not face-evoked, memories. These results can be taken to suggest that the mPFC is a critical structure for connecting musical cues with particularly specific and episodically detailed autobiographical memories.

How rational is typical human reasoning? Starting in the 1970s with work on biases in psychology (Kahneman & Tversky, 1972), a popular answer became: shockingly irrational. Human reasoners use faulty reasoning rules, called heuristics, that led to irrational patterns of reasoning. Human reasoners using these rules were described as 'systematically irrational' (Armstrong & Minderman, 2018, p. 5607), and the outlook for human rationality was thought to be 'bleak' (Nisbett & Borgida, 1975, p. 935).Perhaps predictably, other authors pushed back against this view of human rationality. In cognitive science, advocates of bounded (e.g., Simon, 1997), ecological (e.g., Gigerenzer & Selten, 2002, or resource (e.g., Lieder & Griffiths, 2020) rationality all argued that human beings only look irrational on an implausibly idealized view of rationality. Norms of deductive inference and probabilistic coherence 'promote standards of rationality which it is simply impossible to live up to' (Rysiew, 2008(Rysiew, , p. 1164, and 'people can, and often should, use very reliable

The findings extend our understanding of how musical instruments are processed at neural system level, and elucidate factors that may explain why brain damage may or may not produce anomia or agnosia for musical instruments. Our findings also help inform broader understanding of category-related knowledge mapping in the brain, as musical instruments possess several characteristics that are similar to various other categories of items: They are inanimate and highly manipulable (similar to tools), produce characteristic sounds (similar to animals), and require fine-grained visual differentiation between each other (similar to people). (PsycINFO Database Record

We argue that the concept of practical wisdom is particularly useful for organizing, understanding, and improving human-machine interactions. We consider the relationship between philosophical analysis of wisdom and psychological research into the development of wisdom. We adopt a practical orientation that suggests a conceptual engineering approach is needed, where philosophical work involves refinement of the concept in response to contributions by engineers and behavioral scientists. The former are tasked with encoding as much wise design as possible into machines themselves, as well as providing sandboxes or workspaces to help various stakeholders build practical wisdom in systems that are sufficiently realistic to aid transferring skills learned to real-world use. The la er are needed for the design of exercises and methods of evaluation within these workspaces, as well as ways of empirically assessing the transfer of wisdom from workspace to world. Systematic interaction between these three disciplines (and others) is the best approach to engineering wisdom for the machine age.