The Mechanism Of The Effect Of Listening To Emotional Music On Declarative Memor

The relationship between music and cognitive processing is one of the controversial issues in the field of educational research.Some studies suggest that listening to music can promote cognitive processing by affecting listeners’ emotions,while others do not.These contradictory results may be due to the fact that it is difficult to exclude the impacts of individual factors in previous studies,so that it is not possible to clarify the potential effects of music’s emotional types.On the other hands,cognitive activities in the real world are often accompanied by interference.So how does listening to emotional music inhibit irrelevant interference and promote cognitive processing? The question has not been addressed.Based on the possible correlation between music and language,the present study focused on declarative memory(including semantic memory and episodic memory)and conducted three EEG or ERP experiments.The present study first investigated the effects of music’s emotional types on semantic memory.On this basis,the present study further investigated whether and how listening to emotional music inhibited irrelevant interference and affected episodic memory,so as to provide evidence for the mechanism of music’s influences on cognitive processing.Experiment 1 investigated the effects of listening to music expressing different types of emotion on semantic memory.In order to exclude the influences of individual factors and explore the purely effects of emotional attributes of music on semantic memory,the present study used inter-subject correlation analysis;that is,to calculate the commonality(or correlation)of neural responses between several participants when listening to a piece of common natural music and news.In this experiment,the pleasantness(high vs.low)and arousal(high vs.low)of music were manipulated,and the noise condition was used as the control.Therefore,100 participants were randomly divided into five groups.Behavioral results showed that compared with low-pleasantness music,participants’ memory performance was better after listening to high-pleasantness music.In addition,neither the musical arousal nor the interaction between pleasantness and arousal of music affected their memory performance.Another one-way ANOVA found that only listening to high-pleasantness-high-arousal music promoted subsequent semantic memory compared to the control.The results of EEG showed that listening to high-pleasantness music evoked higher inter-subject correlation than low-pleasantness music,and listening to low-arousal music evoked higher inter-subject correlation than high-arousal music.Additionally,one-way ANOVA revealed that,compared with the control condition,listening to high-pleasantness-high-arousal and high-pleasantness-low-arousal music evoked the highest correlation of EEG responses between participants,although listening to all four types of music increased the inter-subject correlation.The above behavioral and EEG results suggest that high-pleasantness-high-arousal music has the best facilitating effects on memory processing.Based on the findings of experiment 1,both of the experiments 2 and 3 selected high-pleasantness-high-arousal music as the musical stimulus.In order to reveal whether and how listening to music inhibits interference and affects the processing of memory encoding and retrieval,experiments 2 and 3 investigated the effect of listening to high-pleasantness-high-arousal music on episodic memory in interference situation through the classical study-test paradigm,with silence condition as the control.Experiment 2 investigated the effect of listening to music on episodic memory in auditory unimodal interference situation.This experiment is a mixed design with two factors.The behavioral results showed that participants in the music group recognized old words better and responded faster than those in the silence group.The results of EEG showed that the brain of both groups induced a significant Dm effect during the memory encoding phase,but the Dm effect of music group appeared earlier than that of silence group.During the memory retrieval phase,although the brain of both groups induced a significant FN400 old/new effect,only the music group showed a significant LPC old/new effect.These results suggest that listening to high-pleasantness-high-arousal music accelerates the processing of memory encoding and facilitates the elaborate recollection processing during memory retrieval.Experiment 3 investigated the effect of listening to music on episodic memory in audiovisual cross-modal interference situation.This experiment is also a mixed design with two factors.Behavioral results showed that participants in the music group performed better on both visual episodic memory and auditory tone discrimination tasks than those in the silence group.EEG results showed that only the brain of music group induced a significant Dm effect during the memory encoding phase.During the memory retrieval phase,although the brain of both groups induced a significant FN400 old/new effect,only the music group showed a significant LPC old/new effect.The present study is the first to reveal that music expressing high-pleasantness-high-arousal emotion has the best facilitating effect on semantic memory from the perspective of music’s emotional attributes.At the same time,from the perspective of cognitive control,it was revealed that listening to high-pleasantness-high-arousal music can improve subsequent episodic memory by inhibiting irrelevant interference.Based on these findings,the present study finally proposed the Emotional Experience-Cognitive Control Hypothesis,which would provide evidence for the mechanism of the effects of music listening on cognitive processing,and also provide evidence support and methodological guidance for the aesthetic education work in our country.