Name:Kayla R., Clark

School/Affiliation:Department of Psychological Sciences, Rice University; Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology & Department of Psychology, UCLA

Co-Authors:Thara Venkateswaran, Stephanie L. Leal

Virtual or In-person:In-person

Short Bio:

My name is Kayla Clark, and I am a fifth-year PhD student studying Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience at Rice University in Houston, Texas. My research examines the mechanistic components of music's emotional impacts on episodic memory using behavioral, physiological, and neural methods. The goals of my research are to understand how music impacts memory to help inform and develop music-based interventions for those with memory deficits or impairments.

Abstract:

While emotional responses to music are highly individual, music has been shown to induce emotional arousal across listeners. Previous research demonstrates that music-induced emotional arousal can modulate episodic memory performance, however, more research is needed to understand the optimal conditions needed to boost emotional arousal to effectively modulate memory performance. Further, the mechanisms underlying the musical modulation of memory via emotional arousal have not fully been studied. Emotional arousal is thought trigger the release of endogenous hormones which subsequently act upon brain regions involved in emotion and memory processing, including the amygdala and hippocampus. The hippocampus is essential for episodic memory and hippocampal pattern separation is a critical computation that allows us to remember unique experience despite overlapping information across experiences, which is crucial to avoid catastrophic interference in everyday life. In the current study, we investigated the effects of music-induced emotional arousal on memory using personalized music selections to maximize emotional arousal through preference. Using a multi-modal approach, we assessed various physiological markers of arousal including salivary alpha amylase, heart rate, and pupil dilation. We related these measures of emotional arousal during a post-encoding music intervention to performance on a mnemonic discrimination task, which is known to tax hippocampal pattern separation. We found that music increased emotional arousal across physiological measures, and depending on degree of emotional arousal experienced, participants showed differential memory performance. These findings highlight the importance of identifying the mechanisms underlying music’s effects on memory and potential paths for developing non-invasive, music-based memory interventions.