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Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memory 

Music-evoked autobiographical memory

How does music impact the way we make and recall memories?

The phenomenon of hearing a song and being transported back in time to a vivid experience from one’s personal history is ubiquitous across populations and across the lifespan. Recent research has shown that memories evoked by music are more vivid and emotional than memories evoked by other stimuli, and that characteristics of those memories vary on the basis of the expressed emotionality and acoustic features of memory-evoking music. However, in the case of music-assisted memories, there are many outstanding questions: How is music directing encoding and retrieval processes differently? Are musical memories more accurate or just recalled more vividly? And what cognitive-emotional mechanisms underlie this relationship?
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Our research uses approaches from experimental psychology, neuroscience and computing to address outstanding questions regarding the relationship between music and autobiographical memory. Using methods including music information retrieval (MIR), EEG, virtual reality, and experience sampling, we explore the contributions of individual difference, stimulus features, aesthetic response and the underlying neural mechanisms involved in music-assisted memory. 

Publications

  • Nawaz, S., & Omigie, D. (2023). Investigating the interaction of pleasantness and arousal and the role of aesthetic emotions on episodic memory using a musical what-where-when paradigm. Cognition and Emotion, 37(2), 320–328. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2023.2185206

  • Nawaz, S., & Omigie, D. (2024). Qualities of music-evoked autobiographical memories are associated with auditory features of the memory-evoking music [Manuscript submitted for publication]. Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths University of London.

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