Hearing Things That Weren’t There: Music and Its Effect on Memory Distortion.

This study is looking at how the presence of music during the encoding and recall stages of the memory process affects susceptibility to false memories. Because familiar music will have more of an emotional impact on your memory and therefore have a stronger impact on the cues from encoding, it is hypothesized that the strongest confidence marker will be with participant selected music and a weaker, but still significant relationship would come from research selected (music, but unfamiliar), and the white noise condition will have the least impact. The encoding specificity principle is a theory that says that memory retrieval is most successful when the conditions present during the retrieval stage match to the conditions of the encoding stage (Tulving, 1971). In addition to that, Abrahan (2018) found that music related emotional engagement strengthened memory recall for the emotional images. Research also suggests that emotionally meaningful information may be more susceptible to memory distortion. Bookbinder and Brainerd (2016) found that emotion can influence the accuracy of memories. On top of encoding specificity, emotional responses can impact the generation or distortion of memory. It is hypothesized that the emotional response to familiar music will impact the confidence in a false memory more than unfamiliar music. In various auditory environments (white noise, researcher selected music, and participant selected music) the participants will be asked to study a word list. After that, they will engage in multiplication math drills for three minutes. After that they will be presented with a test list of words, including studied words, novel words, and a lure word which shares a theme with the studied list (citation). They will simply mark “yes” this word was on the list or “no” this word was not on the original list. After that they will be asked via likert scale to rate their confidence in their answer. They will then repeat this process with different words, and different math problems two more times, in the other auditory conditions. Participants will also be asked on a scale of 1 to 10 how familiar they are with the music that was played each in condition. It is predicted that the participant selected music condition will have the highest false memory rate, and also the highest confidence level for the lure item.