Saccadic Eye-Movements Suppress Visual Mental Imagery and Partly Reduce Emotional Response During Music Listening

Abstract

Visual mental imagery has been proposed to be an underlying mechanism of music-induced emotion, yet very little is known about the phenomenon due to its ephemeral nature. The present study utilised a saccadic eye-movement task designed to suppress visual imagery during music listening. Thirty-five participants took part in Distractor (eye-movement) and Control (blank screen) conditions, and reported the prevalence, control, and vividness of their visual imagery, and felt emotion ratings using the GEMS-9 in response to short excerpts of film music. The results show that the eye-movement task was highly effective in reducing ratings for prevalence and vividness of visual imagery, and for one GEMS item, Nostalgia, but was not successful in reducing control of imagery or the remaining GEMS items in response to the music. This represents a novel approach to understanding the potentially causal role of visual imagery on music-induced emotion, on which future research can build by considering the attentional mechanisms that a distraction task may pose during music-induced visual imagery formation.

The Role of Embodied Simulation and Visual Imagery in Emotional Contagion with Music

“…These studies also shed light on the role of visual imagery in emotion induction by music. In line with previous studies (Hashim et al, 2020; Küssner & Eerola, 2019; Taruffi et al, 2017; Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2015), in both our experiments, we found that the participants’ descriptions of their thoughts while listening to the music indicate that the majority of them experienced visual images, whose content coincided with the emotions they experienced. For Vuoskoski and Eerola (2015), this visual imagery mechanism was activated by an interaction of the music and the provided narratives, and led to the induction of emotional responses in the participants.…”

“…It is impossible to determine whether the narratives and imagery produced the observed emotional responses, or the aroused emotional states triggered the evoked imagery because we did not manipulate the participants’ imagery and associations with the music. However, a recent investigation found that participants perceived and experienced induced emotions before forming mental images while listening to music (Day & Thompson, 2019), and another found that a distractor task reduced the prevalence and vividness of imagery while listening to music, but had minimal impact on the emotion felt (Hashim et al, 2020). Therefore, our interpretation is that these narratives and imagery were components of the participants’ emotional reactions, not their primary cause (Clore & Ortony, 2013).…”

Eye Closure Interacts with Music to Influence Vividness and Content of Directed Imagery

“…This is an important finding, as it shows that the aforementioned studies investigating the disruptive effect of concurrent visual information on mental imagery also generalize to music-induced imagination. However, as the interaction of music with concurrent visual information was not a research question in the study by Hashim et al (2020), there was no silent control condition. Furthermore, the study was concerned with undirected rather than directed mental imagery and compared the effect of a cognitively taxing and distracting visual task (Kemps & Tiggemann, 2007;Kemps et al, 2004) with another (less demanding) visual condition.…”

“…Whether these are simply additive or interactive, however, is unclear. The study closest related to the topic is recent work by Hashim, Stewart, and Küssner (2020). In their study, 35 participants listened to music whilst either focusing on a blank screen or performing an eye-movement distractor task that required visually tracking a flashing white square (Kemps & Tiggemann, 2007).…”

Music influences vividness and content of imagined journeys in a directed visual imagery task

“…This is consistent with functional neuroimaging research showing activation of the visual cortex during music listening with eyes closed 14 – 16 . Indeed, visual imagery has recently been identified as one of the main sensory modalities of music-evoked mental experiences such as mind-wandering 17 , 18 . This suggests that music functions as a reliable inducer of imagination and could be a promising tool for imagination-based therapies.…”