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When and where in aging: the role of music on source monitoring

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Abstract

Difficulties in source monitoring (SM) tasks observed in healthy older adults may be linked to associative memory deficits since SM requires individuals to correctly bind and later remember these bound features to discriminate the origin of a memory. Therefore, focusing attention on discriminating factors that may attenuate older adults’ difficulties in attributing contextual information to memories is necessary. We investigated the effect of affective information on source monitoring in younger and older adults by manipulating the type of affective information (pictures and music) and assessing the ability to remember spatial and temporal source details for affective pictures encoded while listening to classical music. Older and younger adults viewed a series of affective IAPS pictures presented on the left or right side of the computer screen in two different lists. At test, participants were asked to remember if the picture was seen (right/left), in which list (list1/list2) or whether it was new. Results showed that spatial information was attributed better than temporal information and emotional pictures were attributed better than neutral pictures in both younger and older adults. In addition, although music significantly increased source memory performance in both younger and older participants compared to the white noise condition, the pleasantness of music differentially affected memory for source details. The authors discuss findings in terms of an interaction between music, emotion and cognition in aging.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychological Sciences, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Chieti, Chieti, Italy

    Rocco Palumbo, Nicola Mammarella, Alberto Di Domenico & Beth Fairfield

  2. CeSI-Met, University of Chieti, Chieti, Italy

    Rocco Palumbo, Nicola Mammarella, Alberto Di Domenico & Beth Fairfield

  3. Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Rocco Palumbo

Authors
  1. Rocco Palumbo
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  2. Nicola Mammarella
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  3. Alberto Di Domenico
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  4. Beth Fairfield
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Contributions

NM and BF conceived and designed the experiments; RP and BF performed the experiments; RP and ADD analyzed the data; RP and BF contributed materials/analysis tools; NM, BF, and RP wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rocco Palumbo.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in this study which involved human participants were in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the institutional review boards at University of Chieti.

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All participants gave their informed consent for inclusion before they participated in the study.

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Palumbo, R., Mammarella, N., Di Domenico, A. et al. When and where in aging: the role of music on source monitoring. Aging Clin Exp Res 30, 669–676 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40520-018-0955-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40520-018-0955-4

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