Relating, orienting, evoking and motivating functions of musical stimuli in verbal remembering

This article describes an experiment designed to investigate the influence of musical pleasure and the level of musical hedonia on verbal remembering. Participants’ music-specific hedonia scores were assessed using the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire. They subsequently took part in a memory experiment involving the presentation of word blocks in different auditory contexts, including highly pleasant classical music, lowly pleasant classical music, and the absence of music (encoding phase). Immediately after and 24-hours after the encoding task, participants engaged in word recognition tasks for previously presented words. The presence or absence of musical stimuli did not significantly affect the overall performance of the different participant groups. However, when analyzed individually, participants with a high sensitivity to musical reward, for whom the orienting, evoking, and motivation functions of musical stimuli are likely more pronounced, exhibited better remembering performance when encoding occurred in a pleasant musical context. This study highlights the utility of the new RFT unit of analysis – the ROE-M – in predicting and analyzing such a pattern of results and in examining the fundamental behavioral processes involved.