Evidence of temporal and emotional alignment between song cues and their evoked autobiographical memories

Hearing music can evoke vivid memories from one's past. Here, we examined how musical versus verbal features of pop songs influenced retrieval of autobiographical memories (AMs) and explored mechanisms of action. We first compared the quantity and quality of AMs evoked by musical cues (popular songs) versus matched nonmusical cues (spoken lyrics). On each trial, participants (N = 84) listened to an auditory cue, which was either musical (a song clip) or spoken (a computer-generated neutral voice reading the lyrics from the song clip). While listening, participants indicated via button press whether the cue evoked an AM - if so, they described the AM in text, then rated the AM's properties (e.g., age of the memory, feelings of reliving, cue familiarity). We found that song cues were significantly more likely to evoke AMs (M = 49%) than spoken cues (M = 33%), even when controlling for cue familiarity. Song cues also elicited significantly greater feelings of reliving the evoked AM, compared to spoken cues, though this effect disappeared after controlling for cue familiarity. Critically, we found evidence of temporal and emotional alignment between cues and their evoked AMs: older cues (e.g., songs released in 2017 vs. 2020) evoked older AMs, and more positive cues (e.g., songs of higher valence, as derived from Spotify audio features) evoked AMs with more positive content (as derived from sentiment analysis). Findings suggest that song cues enhance AM accessibility by setting the temporal and emotional contexts for retrieval.