Familiar music facilitates memory retrieval in adults with dementia. However, mechanisms behind this effect, and its generality, are unclear because of a lack of parallel work in healthy aging. Exposure to familiar music enhances spontaneous recall of memories directly cued by the music, but it is unknown whether such effects extend to deliberate recall more generally-e.g., to memories not directly linked to the music being played. It is also unclear whether familiar music boosts recall of specific episodes versus more generalized semantic memories, or whether effects are driven by domain-general mechanisms (e.g., improved mood). In a registered report study, we examined effects of familiar music on deliberate recall in healthy adults ages 65-80 years (N=75) by presenting familiar music from earlier in life, unfamiliar music, and non-musical audio clips across three sessions. After each clip, we assessed free recall of remote memories for pre-selected events. Contrary to our hypotheses, we found no effects of music exposure on recall of prompted events, though familiar music evoked spontaneous memories most often. These results suggest that effects of familiar music on recall may be limited to memories specifically evoked in response to the music (Preprint and registered report protocol at https://osf.io/kjnwd/).'which school did you attend') developed based on the Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE; Folstein et al., 1975), and caregivers verified correct answers. In a different experiment, 10 patients with mild Alzheimer's disease scored higher on average on the Autobiographical Memory Interview (AMI; Kopelman et al., 1989) following listening to Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons' than following silence (Irish et al., 2006). In addition, effects of music on autobiographical recall were stronger for remote memories (events occurring from 0-20 years of age) than mid-remote (20-50 years) or recent memories ('the recent past or present') across several studies using MMSE-based questions to evaluate retrieval (Foster & Valentine, 2001;García et al., 2012).The studies mentioned above played all participants the same pieces of music. This leaves open the possibility that the music may have been familiar to some individuals and not others. However, clinical work has emphasized the benefits of individualized music, or music particularly familiar to a given patient (Gerdner, 2000(Gerdner, , 2012Gerdner et al., 2000;Thomas et al., 2017). In two studies, Alzheimer's patients showed better autobiographical memory recall with exposure to self-chosen music relative to experimenter-chosen music (El Haj et al., 2015;. Those studies used the TEMPau scale to score the specificity of freely recalled autobiographical narratives on a scale from 0-4 (Piolino et al., 2009). Self-chosen music, relative
Music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) are typically elicited by music that listeners have heard before. However, recent evidence indicates that even music that is unfamiliar to the listener can still cue autobiographical memory. Here we examined how perceived familiarity, music-evoked affect, and developmental timing of music release (childhood, adolescence, young adulthood) were associated with evoked memories in older adults (N=75, ages 65-80) who listened to familiar and unfamiliar music in a pre-registered study. More positive music-evoked affect was related to higher MEAM likelihood for both familiar and unfamiliar music. Higher perceived familiarity was associated with the occurrence of MEAMs in response to familiar, but not unfamiliar, music. We also replicated “reminiscence bump” effects for familiar music such that participants reported more MEAMs in response to music released during their adolescence (14-18) than young adulthood (20-25); however, our results indicate that this bump may begin earlier (i.e., middle childhood). Together, our results suggest different mechanisms underlying MEAMs for familiar and unfamiliar music: music-evoked affect may facilitate MEAMs regardless of previous exposure, but perceived familiarity supports MEAMs only for familiar music.
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