Research question
What is the impact of sound on memory retention and recall accuracy?
Experiment
Playing background music while participants perform a memory recall task.
In the first step, we asked the participants to choose one of their “good memories”. When they hear the first song they are asked to write as many details of the memory as they can remember.
In the second step, we asked the participants to choose one of their “bad memories”. When they hear the second song they are asked to write as many details of the memory as they can remember.
Findings
- Contrary to the initial assumption, the song did not have a big influence on recalling the details of the memories. This was surprising.
- It was effective on people’s perception of that song or their feelings about the memory (e.g. one of the participants said that her sad memory turned into fun because of the background music )
- Participants changed the speed of writing with the tempo of the song.
- Participants changed the size of the writing (with more tempo, the writing was bigger)
