Trial reportPsychonomic bulletin & review2022
A tradeoff between musical tension perception and declarative memory.
Trial report in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Hearing movement, seeing sound: multimodal predictive coding in pianist-dancer interaction.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Increasing the complexity of isolated musical chords benefits concurrent associative memory formation.Scientific reports · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Successful formation of long-term declarative memory is influenced, among other things, by attention, emotion, and deviation from expectations. A unique form of expectation can be elicited through musical tension, evoked by the prolongation of certain musical progressions. We examined the effect that musical tension exerts on the formation of declarative memory, by composing three original music pieces that contained tension segments, achieved by delays in release from dominant to tonic harmonies. Music-evoked tension was validated using music information retrieval (MIR) analysis, as well as skin conductance response (SCR) measures. Indeed, tension-evoking musical excerpts were associated with heightened SCR, corroborated by increased subjective ratings of tension, as compared to neutral excerpts. In the main experiment, 50 participants listened to the three musical pieces while they were presented with unique images that were randomly assigned to four conditions: tension, tension-release, neutral music, and silence. One day later, their memory for the images was examined using a recognition test. We found that memory performance was enhanced for images presented during both neutral and tense music compared to silence. Moreover, we observed a tradeoff effect between post-experiment tension perception and memory, such that individuals who perceived musical tension as such displayed reduced memory performance for images encoded during musical tension, whereas tense music benefited memory for those with lower musical tension perception. Understanding the interrelations between musical components, which exert powerful and fundamental responses in humans, and cognitive faculties, may provide insights as to the basic features of memory formation.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.