The Effects of Film Music on Neural Activity in Higher-Order Brain Areas and Comprehension for the Film Narrative

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Music is a powerful memory cue that can reliably transport us to our past -- in effect, strengthening the associative bond between our present and our past. Modern neuroscientific investigations of episodic memory could benefit from the use of music due to its role as a potent memory cue. In this proposal, my goal is to understand how music shapes memory for past events and how these associations between events are represented in the brain. The proposed work builds on recent functional MRI studies that have used naturalistic experimental paradigms such as movie watching and recall to test and refine theories of memory that (previously) had only been tested under highly-controlled conditions. Here we explore how film scores shape memory for movies. In movies, film scores sometimes have recurrent structure where a particular theme song will be repeated throughout, potentially bringing back to mind information from previous events in which that theme song had been played. Based on prior work showing that retrieval of a memory strengthens that memory, we predict that the presence of recurrent musical structure in a film will trigger retrieval of previous events during movie-watching, which (in turn) will boost memory for these events on a later recall test. In our study, two groups of participants are recruited: The first group watches a version of a movie in its original form (with the film score intact) and the control group watches the same film with the entire film score removed (while preserving dialogue and ambient sounds). Participants from both groups are asked to return the following day to recall the entire movie in chronological order. By comparing neural activity between scenes containing music and previous scenes containing the same (or similar) music between the two groups, we expect to find evidence of neural reinstatement of past scenes in the music group; furthermore, we predict that higher levels of reinstatement during movie-viewing will be associated with better subsequent recall of the movie in the music group relative to the control group. This work will provide basic-science insight into how memory works in real-world contexts. It will also shed light on how musical cues can strengthen memories and improve recall; if the predicted cueing effects are observed, these techniques could be used in future work to boost performance in memory-impaired clinical populations.