Spontaneous mental replay of music improves memory for musical sequence knowledge

Involuntary musical imagery (INMI; more commonly known as "earworms" or having a song "stuck in your head") is a common musical phenomenon and one of the most salient examples of spontaneous cognition. Despite the ubiquitous nature of INMI in the general population, functional roles of INMI remain to be fully established and characterized. Findings that spontaneous reactivation of mental representations aids in memory consolidation raise the possibility that INMI also serves in this capacity. In three experiments, we manipulated the probability of experiencing INMI for novel music loops by first exposing participants to these loops during tasks that varied in attentional and sensorimotor demands. We measured INMI for loops and the quality of individual loop memories using different tasks both immediately following exposure and at a delay of 1 week. Across experiments, reduced exposure to music had the largest effect on INMI and loop memory. In Experiments 1 and 2, music encoding was resilient to manipulations of attentional focus; however, in Experiment 3, engaging sequence learning processes with an unrelated task during music exposure reduced the subsequent accuracy of loop memories and the likelihood of experiencing INMI. In each experiment, the amount of INMI experienced for a loop across the delay period predicted improvements in the accuracy of a loop memory over time. We thus provide evidence for a memory-consolidation role for INMI, in which the spontaneous replay of recently encoded music is related to the quality of music encoding and predicts changes in music memory over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).