Listeners remember music they like.

Abstract

Emotions have important and powerful effects on cognitive processes. Although it is well established that memory influences liking, we sought to document whether liking influences memory. A series of 6 experiments examined whether liking is related to recognition memory for novel music excerpts. In the general method, participants listened to a set of music excerpts and rated how much they liked each one. After a delay, they heard the same excerpts plus an equal number of novel excerpts and made recognition judgments, which were then examined in conjunction with liking ratings. Higher liking ratings were associated with improved recognition performance after a 10-min (Experiment 1) or 24-hr (Experiment 2) delay between the exposure and test phases. The findings were similar when participants made liking ratings after recognition judgments (Experiments 3 and 6), when possible confounding effects of similarity and familiarity were held constant (Experiment 4), and when a deeper level of processing was encouraged for all the excerpts (Experiment 5). Recognition did not vary as a function of liking for previously unheard excerpts (Experiment 6). The results implicate a direct association between liking and recognition. Considered jointly with previous findings, it is now clear that listeners tend to like music that they remember and to remember music that they like.

Moderate Contrast in the Evaluation of Paintings Is Liked More but Remembered Less than High Contrast

“…Instead, paintings initially observed in the high contrast condition were remembered best. This result did not support the hypothesis nor earlier findings that indicated better memory performance stimuli that were appreciated more and had a processing benefit of previous exposure (Stalinski and Schellenberg, 2013). Apparently, the mechanisms underlying appreciation for contrast-manipulated art and the one underlying memory for contrast-manipulated art are not the same.…”

“…Because a memory trace for a previously presented item is formed, processing of the item at a later point in time is facilitated. Indeed, in Experiment 6 of the Stalinski and Schellenberg study (2013), in which exposure to the music excerpts was manipulated, an interaction was found between the liking of excerpts with previous exposure, and recognition of these excerpts.…”

“…So far, only a few studies have looked at the impact of aesthetically appealing stimuli on memory. One study (Stalinski and Schellenberg, 2013) examined the role of liking novel music excerpts on recognition memory. Participants listened to novel music excerpts and indicated on a 7-point scale how much they liked them.…”

“…Given these findings on the role of contrast on art appreciation (e.g., Spehar et al, 2015) and the effect of stimuli appreciation on memory performance (Stalinski and Schellenberg, 2013), our hypotheses were as follows. If contrast level is being manipulated into higher contrast levels relative to the original painting, then the moderate contrast condition should result in higher appreciation than the high contrast condition.…”

Mondegreens and Soramimi as a Method to Induce Misperceptions of Speech Content – Influence of Familiarity, Wittiness, and Language Competence

“…A large body of evidence indicates greater allocation of attentional resources [18], enhancement of perceptual vividness [19], as well as better memory [20] to stimuli of affective value and similar effects have also been demonstrated for musical stimuli [21]–[23]. Therefore, we predicted that humor appreciation modulates the occurrence of induced misperceptions.…”