The impact of musical pleasure and musical hedonia on verbal episodic memory

Abstract

Music listening is one of the most pleasurable activities in our life. As a rewarding stimulus, pleasant music could induce long-term memory improvements for the items encoded in close temporal proximity. In the present study, we behaviourally investigated (1) whether musical pleasure and musical hedonia enhance verbal episodic memory, and (2) whether such enhancement takes place even when the pleasant stimulus is not present during the encoding. Participants (N = 100) were asked to encode words presented in different auditory contexts (highly and lowly pleasant classical music, and control white noise), played before and during (N = 49), or only before (N = 51) the encoding. The Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire was used to measure participants’ sensitivity to musical reward. 24 h later, participants’ verbal episodic memory was tested (old/new recognition and remember/know paradigm). Results revealed that participants with a high musical reward sensitivity present an increased recollection performance, especially for words encoded in a highly pleasant musical context. Furthermore, this effect persists even when the auditory stimulus is not concurrently present during the encoding of target items. Taken together, these findings suggest that musical pleasure might constitute a helpful encoding context able to drive memory improvements via reward mechanisms.

Dopamine modulations of reward‐driven music memory consolidation

“…No significant differences were found for the other subjective ratings, namely, emotional valence and top‐ten ratings ( P’ s > 0.118). These findings are consistent with previous studies showing a link between pleasure and memory formation 25,47 …”

“…Notably, and in line with this literature, our findings suggest that the drug manipulation differentially modulated participants' performance as a function of their sensitivity to musical reward. Under levodopa, there is a trend toward greater reward‐potentiated effects on music in individuals with lower music reward sensitivity, who generally show poorer reward–memory effects 25,47 and reduced engagement of dopaminergic circuits while listening to music 14 . Thus, only individuals with low sensitivity to music benefited from the increase in dopaminergic transmission, while performance in music hedonic individuals was disrupted.…”

Effects of transcranial direct current stimulation combined with listening to preferred music on memory in older adults

“…Furthermore, performance in the R2 and R4 repetition lags approached ceiling, which may have masked differences between neurostimulation conditions. Although some research has examined the effects of listening to autobiographically-salient music on subsequent episodic memory in younger adults 7 , 9 , this finding in healthy older adults is limited to one pilot study that found no change in verbal episodic memory after listening to non-preferred or preferred music 74 . Studies have examined episodic memory performance in older adults in the presence of concurrent background music during encoding or retrieval stages 6 , 75 , 76 , but it is unclear whether the observed changes are attributed to the arousal-and-mood hypothesis or some other attentional mechanism 1 , 2 .…”

“…Research into the arousal-and-mood hypothesis has suggested that listening to enjoyable music can heighten arousal and induce positive affect, thereby influencing subsequent cognitive performance 1 , 2 . In older adults, benefits following music listening were shown in various cognitive domains such as autobiographical memory recall 3 , working memory 4 , semantic fluency 5 , semantic memory 6 , and episodic memory 7 – 9 . Given individual differences in musical listening preferences and distastes, autobiographically-salient music may be of particular interest in subsequently eliciting cognitive benefits following music listening.…”

Human Genomics and the Biocultural Origin of Music

“…There is, indeed, direct evidence not only for the causal role of dopamine in pleasure response when listening to music as compared to highly rewarding hedonic experiences, but also for the stimulation of oxytocin and the consequent inducement of prosocial behavior [38][39][40][41]. Neuroimaging, neuropsychological and brain stimulation studies in musical anhedonia (the inability to find music pleasurable) also seem to suggest that human appreciation of music emerges from the predictive process of auditory perception, which connects to the structures involved in the brain's dopaminergic reward system, to the extent that it may function as a stimulus for verbal episodic memory and learning [42][43][44].…”