2026/06/04 by Fruzsina Lilla Szücs, Kelly Jakubowski, Tuomas Eerola · 1 voice
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Neuroscience and Music Perception #Identity, Memory, and Therapy #Music Therapy and Health
paper · doi:10.31234/osf.io/wy4mj_v1
openalex publication_date 2026/06/04 · openalex created_date 2026/06/07 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
While the effect of music on autobiographical memories has been examined in the past, it has not yet been studied how semantic associations with music cues influence the content and phenomenology of autobiographical memories. In a repeated-measures design experiment with 53 participants, we tested how 14 musical cues depicting semantic associations, in either a more concrete (e.g., “birds”) or abstract (e.g., “French café ambience”) manner, influenced the recall of autobiographical memories and the phenomenological characteristics of these. Some music excerpts evoked a high proportion of memories containing our expected semantic association (e.g. “Loss” and “Latin-American ambience”). Others were less successful in evoking the expected semantic association, but nevertheless evoked memories with a high degree of shared content (e.g., “Calmness”). There were no statistically significant differences found in the phenomenological characteristics of the memories evoked by more concrete versus abstract music cues. These results indicate that music can convey shared semantic meaning across listeners that shapes the content of associated memories, although this capacity varies substantially across different musical cues. Findings from this study have implications for how music may be used as a memory cue in comparison to other cue types in both clinical and everyday settings.