Annotated Bibliography #5 Angela Martin UWRT 1103/020

Mado Proverbio, Alice, et al. "The Effect of Background Music on Episodic Memory and

Autonomic Responses: Listening to Emotionally Touching Music Enhances Facial

Memory Capacity." Scientific Reports (Nature Publisher Group), vol. 5, 2015, pp. 15219,

ProQuest, https://librarylink.uncc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-

com.librarylink.uncc.edu/docview/1899786876?accountid=14605,

doi:http://dx.doi.org.librarylink.uncc.edu/10.1038/srep15219.

The peer-reviewed scientific article “The Effect of Background Music on Episodic

Memory and Autonomic Responses: Listening to Emotionally Touching Music Enhances Facial

Memory Capacity” was significantly helpful in understanding the effects background music has

on mental processing, specifically memory. The article described a psychological study

completed by Alice Mado Proverbio, professor of physiological psychology at the University of

Milan-Bicocca. The study aimed to investigate the effects of listening to either silence, joyful

music, emotional music, or rain in 54 non-musicians and their abilities to memorize faces. It was

concluded from the study that silence and emotional music is the most optimal for memory and

cognitive performance, while joyful music and rain hinder these abilities. Mado Proverbio is

extremely qualified to perform a study of this nature. She has received two doctorate degrees

related to psychology, practiced as a research scientist, founded a cognitive electrophysiology

lab, and even written four books about psychology. The intended audience of this article is most

likely students or other academics involved with psychology due to its extreme scientific nature

and jargon. For example, Mado Proverbio states “In particular, with regard to faces, it has been

shown that subjects were more accurate at detecting sub-threshold happy faces while listening to
happy music and vice versa for sad faces and sad music. This suggests that music is able to

modulate visual perception by altering early visual cortex activity and sensory processing in a

binding modality.” The jargon in these sentences is very formal as well as contains words

relating to psychology and neuroscience that would not be understood by the average person.

Despite its technicality, this quote is interesting because Mado Proverbio is saying that we

project the feelings of the music we listen to onto our visual surroundings.

 “The interference caused by task-irrelevant information (for example, listening to music)

also depends on the complexity of the information that is being processed and on the

workload that is required to process task-relevant information. Indeed, increasingly

complex musical distractions may result in decreased cognitive performance,” (Mado

Proverbio).

 Listening to background music vs. silence has also been reported to interfere with many

additional cognitive processes, including the ability to perform arithmetic; performance

on verbal, numerical and diagrammatic analysis tests; multimedia learning; the learning

of new procedures; reading; and inhibition of performance of the Stroop task,” (Mado

Proverbio).

 “Overall, the results of this study demonstrated that subjects more accurately encoded

faces while listening to emotionally touching music compared to listening to rain or

joyful music, similarly to conditions of silence . . .” (Mado Proverbio).

 “Therefore, a hypothesis can be proposed that suggests that listening to emotionally

touching music leads to emotionally-driven audiovisual encoding that strengthens

memory engrams for faces that are visualized in this context, whereas listening to either

rain or joyful music produces interfering effects by overloading perceptual channels

 during face encoding, as predicted by numerous studies that have described the persistent

negative effects of listening to music on memory performance,” (Mado Proverbio).

Overall, I thought that the article “The Effect of Background Music on Episodic Memory

and Autonomic Responses: Listening to Emotionally Touching Music Enhances Facial Memory

Capacity” was a very difficult but informative read. It was definitely not intended for the average

audience, so I had to skip over a few sections that I could not understand whatsoever. The

information presented from the study is extremely applicable to my question because it provides

data for my research on the effects of listening to music and memory. Mado Proverbio had no

bias and provided evidence from other studies of both the positive and negative effects of music

and memory. This source relates to my other sources by diving in deeper to the scientific and

cognitive effects of music. Some of my previous sources contained general statements about

music and its relation to memory, but this source was entirely dedicated to it. This source has

caused me to think of other research questions such as: Are memory and concentration related

in cognitive processing? Since emotional music is proposed as the best genre of music, what

exactly is defined as emotional music? Can the emotional music have vocals? This source could

help other students researching ways to improve memory or how outside stimuli affect brain

processes.