Mary Had a Little... : Stimulus-Elicited Involuntary Musical Imagery

We used the reflexive imagery task (RIT) to investigate how musical imagery can arise involuntarily in response to an external stimulus. In the basic RIT, participants are presented with visual objects and instructed not to think of the names of these objects. On a majority of the trials, the participants reported that they thought of the name of the objects. The imagery elicited by RITs are of very short duration (e.g., the time it takes to subvocalize a name). It has been proposed that RIT effects cannot arise for imagery that is of longer duration (e.g., musical imagery). To investigate this matter, in our version of the RIT, participants heard and learned four simple, novel songs. The lyrics for each song consisted of numbers, counting from one to ten. The “minimal training” condition consisted of 10 presentations of each song; the “extended training” condition consisted of 30 presentations of each song. After training, participants were presented with fragments of each melody (fragments of different lengths) and instructed to not “sing in their minds” the remainder of the melody. Participants reported whether they involuntarily continued the melody as musical imagery and reported the number associated with the termination point of the experienced imagery. One-third of the participants experienced substantive, involuntary musical imagery. The current finding illuminates the limitations of involuntary mechanisms.