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Involuntary and voluntary recall of musical memories: A comparison of temporal accuracy and emotional responses

Jakubowski, Kelly; Bashir, Zaariyah; Farrugia, Nicolas; Stewart, Lauren

Involuntary and voluntary recall of musical memories: A comparison of temporal accuracy and emotional responses Thumbnail


Authors

Zaariyah Bashir

Nicolas Farrugia

Lauren Stewart



Abstract

Comparisons between involuntarily and voluntarily retrieved autobiographical memories have revealed similarities in encoding and maintenance, with differences in terms of specificity and emotional responses. Our study extended this research area into the domain of musical memory, which afforded a unique opportunity to compare the same memory as accessed both involuntarily and voluntarily. Specifically, we compared instances of involuntary musical imagery (INMI, or “earworms”)—the spontaneous mental recall and repetition of a tune—to deliberate recall of the same tune as voluntary musical imagery (VMI) in terms of recall accuracy and emotional responses. Twenty participants completed two 3-day tasks. In an INMI task, participants recorded information about INMI episodes as they occurred; in a VMI task, participants were prompted via text message to deliberately imagine each tune they had previously experienced as INMI. In both tasks, tempi of the imagined tunes were recorded by tapping to the musical beat while wearing an accelerometer and additional information (e.g., tune name, emotion ratings) was logged in a diary. Overall, INMI and VMI tempo measurements for the same tune were strongly correlated. Tempo recall for tunes that have definitive, recorded versions was relatively accurate, and tunes that were retrieved deliberately (VMI) were not recalled more accurately in terms of tempo than spontaneous and involuntary instances of imagined music (INMI). Some evidence that INMI elicited stronger emotional responses than VMI was also revealed. These results demonstrate several parallels to previous literature on involuntary memories and add new insights on the phenomenology of INMI.

Citation

Jakubowski, K., Bashir, Z., Farrugia, N., & Stewart, L. (2018). Involuntary and voluntary recall of musical memories: A comparison of temporal accuracy and emotional responses. Memory and Cognition, 46(5), 741-756. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-018-0792-x

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jan 12, 2018
Online Publication Date Jan 29, 2018
Publication Date Jul 1, 2018
Deposit Date Jan 31, 2018
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Memory and Cognition
Print ISSN 0090-502X
Electronic ISSN 1532-5946
Publisher Psychonomic Society
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 46
Issue 5
Pages 741-756
DOI https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-018-0792-x

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version © The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.





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