Erratum: The effect of background music on episodic memory and autonomic responses: listening to emotionally touching music enhances facial memory capacity

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate how background auditory processing can affect other perceptual and cognitive processes as a function of stimulus content, style and emotional nature. Previous studies have offered contrasting evidence, and it has been recently shown that listening to music negatively affected concurrent mental processing in the elderly but not in young adults. To further investigate this matter, the effect of listening to music vs. listening to the sound of rain or silence was examined by administering an old/new face memory task (involving 448 unknown faces) to a group of 54 non-musician university students. Heart rate and diastolic and systolic blood pressure were measured during an explicit face study session that was followed by a memory test. The results indicated that more efficient and faster recall of faces occurred under conditions of silence or when participants were listening to emotionally touching music. Whereas auditory background (e.g., rain or joyful music) interfered with memory encoding, listening to emotionally touching music improved memory and significantly increased heart rate. It is hypothesized that touching music is able to modify the visual perception of faces by binding facial properties with auditory and emotionally charged information (music), which may therefore result in deeper memory encoding.

Music‐basedinterventions forcommunity‐dwellingpeople with dementia: A systematic review

“…This is in line with studies of healthy adults showing benefits of ‘sad’ or ‘moving’ music, e.g. in the context of encoding new faces (Proverbio et al, 2015), verbal recall, and phonemic fluency assessments (Bottiroli et al, 2014). Whether this is due to a level of emotional arousal that is favourable for cognitive function (e.g.…”

“…All of the longer interventions included caregiver-facilitated home-based components (Särkämö et al, 2014;Satoh et al, 2015) or were entirely facilitated by informal caregivers at home (Li et al, 2015). Therefore, it is possible that the administration of the (Proverbio et al, 2015), verbal recall, and phonemic fluency assessments (Bottiroli et al, 2014). Whether this is due to a level of emotional arousal that is favourable for cognitive function (e.g.…”

“…Bottiroli et al, 2014; Proverbio et al, 2018) or whether ‘sad’ music provides a context uniquely qualified for memories to be formed and retrieved (e.g. Irish et al, 2006; Proverbio et al, 2015) remains an open question. Further clarification of the mechanism behind music's positive effects is needed.…”

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