Emotions can have important and powerful effects on cognitive processes. The emotional content of stimuli plays a role, as does the perceiver’s emotional response. Of particular interest here was whether subjective reactions (i.e., liking) to novel stimuli are related to subsequent memory performance. Although it is well established that memory influences liking, the present investigation sought to document whether the association is reciprocal, asking if liking influences memory.
A series of five experiments examined whether liking is related to recognition memory for novel music excerpts. In the general method, participants listened to a set of music excerpts and rated how much they liked each one. After a delay, they heard the same excerpts plus an equal number of novel excerpts and made recognition judgments, which were then examined in conjunction with liking ratings. Across all five experiments, higher liking ratings were associated with improved recognition performance. This association was evident after a 24-h delay between the exposure and test phases (Experiment 2), when participants made liking ratings after recognition judgments (Experiment 3), when possible confounding effects of similarity and familiarity were held constant (Experiment 4), and when a deeper level of processing was encouraged for all of the excerpts (Experiment 5). The findings implicate the presence of a direct association between liking and recognition. Considered jointly with previous findings, it is now clear that listeners tend to like music that they remember, and to remember music that they like.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/32900 |
| Date | 31 August 2012 |
| Creators | Stalinski, Stephanie Marie |
| Contributors | Schellenberg, E. Glenn |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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