These findings are consistent with cognitive functions and affective/emotional states associated with conduction pathways of the hypothalamus involving cortical association areas and amygdala and hippocampal formation. These abnormalities can account for the prominent deficit found in integrating information in the processing of memories.

We examined the effects of presentation modality and learning style preference on people's ability to learn and remember unfamiliar melodies and sentences. In Experiment 1, we gauged musicians' and nonmusicians' learning efficiency for meaningful and less meaningful melodies as well as sentences when presented visually or auditorily. In Experiment 2, we tested the effects of the same variables on memory. Presentation modality did not make a difference, but learning-style preference did. Visual learners learned visually presented items faster and remembered them better than auditorily presented ones, and auditory learners did the reverse. Also, as expected, meaningful sentences were learned faster and remembered better than less meaningful ones. However, although musicians also learned meaningful melodies faster and remembered them better than less meaningful melodies, this was not the case for nonmusicians.

Participants heard music snippets of varying melodic and instrumental familiarity paired with animalname titles. They then recalled the target when given either the melody or the title as a cue, or they gave feeling-of-knowing (FOK) ratings. In general, recall for titles was better than it was for melodies, and recall was enhanced with increasing melodic familiarity of both the cues and the targets. Accuracy of FOK ratings, but not magnitude, also increased with increasing familiarity. Although similar ratings were given after melody and title cues, accuracy was better with title cues. Finally, knowledge of the real titles of the familiar music enhanced recall but had, by and large, no effect on the FOK ratings.

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