Guest Editor’s Introduction April 2023

One of the most commonly reported reasons for listening to music is simply because people find it enjoyable (Sanflippo et al., 2020). Despite aesthetic appreciation playing an important role in the motivation to listen to music, aesthetic responses to music have not been investigated as frequently as in other types of artistic modalities. This is perhaps due to the history of the field of music perception and cognition, which has traditionally focused more on basic perceptual functions and components of music, such as perception of pitch and rhythm, rather than aesthetic aspects of music listening. At this point, the study of music cognition and perception has spanned several decades, and music cognition is beginning to firmly establish itself as a key subfield within cognitive psychology and neuroscience more broadly. While the study of music cognition has continued to grow, it has done so somewhat in parallel with the psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts. Although the two research communities (that is, music cognition and empirical aesthetics) study similar topics using similar methods, the level of interaction between the two communities has been less than what one might expect. This could in part be due to the fact that the study of aesthetics tends to come from an academic tradition that is often considered to refer more specifically to the visual arts or visual stimuli more broadly (e.g., Arnheim, 1966; Berlyne, 1971), or at least that may be the perception researchers have of the work done under the banner of the psychology of aesthetic

Hooked on a Feeling: Influence of Brief Exposure to Familiar Music on Feelings of Emotion in Individuals with Alzheimer\u27s Disease

BACKGROUND: Research has indicated that individuals with Alzheimer\u27s-type dementia (AD) can experience prolonged emotions, even when they cannot recall the eliciting event. Less is known about whether music can modify the emotional state of individuals with AD and whether emotions evoked by music linger in the absence of a declarative memory for the eliciting event. OBJECTIVE: We examined the effects of participant-selected recorded music on self-reported feelings of emotion in individuals with AD, and whether these feelings persisted irrespective of declarative memory for the emotion-inducing stimuli. METHODS: Twenty participants with AD and 19 healthy comparisons (HCs) listened to two 4.5-minute blocks of self-selected music that aimed to induce either sadness or happiness. Participants reported their feelings at baseline and three times post-induction and completed recall and recognition tests for the music selections after each induction. RESULTS: Participants with AD had impaired memory for music selections compared to HCs. Both groups reported elevated sadness and negative affect after listening to sad music and increased happiness and positive affect after listening to happy music, relative to baseline. Sad/negative and happy/positive emotions endured up to 20 minutes post-induction. CONCLUSION: Brief exposure to music can induce strong and lingering emotions in individuals with AD. These findings extend the intriguing phenomenon whereby lasting emotions can be prompted by stimuli that are not remembered declaratively. Our results underscore the utility of familiar music for inducing emotions in individuals with AD and may ultimately inform strategies for using music listening as a therapeutic tool with this population

Comparing music‐ and food‐evoked autobiographical memories in young and older adults: A diary study

Previous research has found that music brings back more vivid and emotional autobiographical memories than various other retrieval cues. However, such studies have often been low in ecological validity and constrained by relatively limited cue selection and predominantly young adult samples. Here, we compared music to food as cues for autobiographical memories in everyday life in young and older adults. In two separate four-day periods, 39 younger (ages 18–34) and 39 older (ages 60–77) adults recorded their music- and food-evoked autobiographical memories in paper diaries. Across both age groups, music triggered more frequent autobiographical memories, a greater proportion of involuntary memories, and memories rated as more personally important in comparison to food cues. Age differences impacted music- and food-evoked memories similarly, with older adults consistently recalling older and less specific memories, which they rated as more positive, vivid, and rehearsed. However, young and older adults did not differ in the number or involuntary nature of their recorded memories. This work represents an important step in understanding the phenomenology of naturally occurring music-evoked autobiographical memories across adulthood and provides new insights into how and why music may be a more effective trigger for personally valued memories than certain other everyday cues

The Default-Mode Network Represents Aesthetic Appeal that Generalizes Across Visual Domains

Visual aesthetic evaluations, which impact decision-making and well-being, recruit the ventral visual pathway, subcortical reward circuitry, and parts of the medial prefrontal cortex overlapping with the default-mode network (DMN). However, it is unknown whether these networks represent aesthetic appeal in a domain-general fashion, independent of domain-specific representations of stimulus content (artworks versus architecture or natural landscapes). Using a classification approach, we tested whether the DMN or ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOT) contains a domain-general representation of aesthetic appeal. Classifiers were trained on multivoxel functional MRI response patterns collected while observers made aesthetic judgments about images from one aesthetic domain. Classifier performance (high vs. low aesthetic appeal) was then tested on response patterns from held-out trials from the same domain to derive a measure of domain-specific coding, or from a different domain to derive a measure of domain-general coding. Activity patterns in category-selective VOT contained a degree of domain-specific information about aesthetic appeal, but did not generalize across domains. Activity patterns from the DMN, however, were predictive of aesthetic appeal across domains. Importantly, the ability to predict aesthetic appeal varied systematically; predictions were better for observers who gave more extreme ratings to images subsequently labeled as high or low. These findings support a model of aesthetic appreciation whereby domain-specific representations of the content of visual experiences in VOT feed in to a core domain-general representation of visual aesthetic appeal in the DMN. Whole-brain searchlight analyses identified additional prefrontal regions containing information relevant for appreciation of cultural artifacts (artwork and architecture) but not landscapes

Social Bonding and Music: Evidence from Lesions to the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex

The music and social bonding (MSB) hypothesis suggests that damage to brain regions in the proposed neurobiological model, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), would disrupt the social and emotional effects of music. This commentary evaluates prior research in persons with vmPFC damage in light of the predictions put forth by the MSB hypothesis

Impaired Naming of Famous Musical Melodies is Associated with Left Temporal Polar Damage

Objective: Previous research has shown that damage to the left temporal pole (LTP) is associated with impaired retrieval of words for unique entities, including names of famous people and landmarks. However, it is not known whether retrieving names for famous melodies is associated with the LTP. The aim of this study was to investigate the hypothesis that damage to the LTP would be associated with impaired naming of famous musical melodies. Method: A Melody Naming Test was administered to patients with LTP damage, brain damaged comparison (BDC) patients, and normal comparison participants (NC). The test included various well-known melodies (e.g., Pop Goes the Weasel ). After hearing each melody, participants were asked to rate their familiarity with the melody and identify it by name. Results: LTP patients named significantly fewer melodies than BDC and NC participants. Recognition of melodies did not differ significantly between groups. Conclusions: The findings suggest that LTP supports retrieval of names for famous melodies. More broadly, these results extend support for the theoretical notion that LTP is important for retrieving proper names for unique concepts, irrespectively of stimulus modality or category

Music and Autobiographical Memory

Listening to music can bring back vivid memories from one\u27s past. In recent years there has been an increase in both scientific and public interest in the ability of music to evoke vivid, emotional, and rich autobiographical memories. For example, several “viral” videos have taken the internet by storm, illustrating powerful instances of music evoking memories in individuals with dementia – perhaps the most recent example is a clip of a former ballerina with Alzheimer\u27s disease who recalls her dance movements at the sound of “Swan Lake.” Current scientific work in this area informs the mechanisms by which music induces emotions and provides critical evidence for assessing whether music is a uniquely effective memory cue. Research on music and autobiographical memory is also of practical relevance by informing the development of music-based interventions, for example, for people with memory disorders

The Famous Melodies Stimulus Set

Famous musical melodies, such as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “Hot Cross Buns,” are frequently used in psychological research. Such melodies have been used to assess the degree of cognitive impairments in various neurological disorders, and to investigate differences between “naming” vs. “knowing.” Despite their utility as an experimental stimulus, there is currently no standardized, openly available set of famous musical melodies based on a United States population, as prior work on the topic has primarily relied on creating stimuli in an ad hoc manner. Therefore, the goal of the present work was to create a set of famous musical melodies. Here, we describe the development of the Famous Melodies Stimulus Set, a set of 107 melodies. We provide normative data for the melodies on five dimensions: familiarity, age of acquisition, emotional valence, emotional arousal, and naming ability. Participants (N = 397) rated the melodies on these five variables, validating that most melodies were highly familiar and reliably named. While familiarity ratings were skewed, all other rating scales covered a relatively broad range, allowing for researchers to select melodies for future work based on particular attributes