Schedule of Events | Symposia

Earworms, memory consolidation, and neural replay for recently heard music

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 1 - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT, Grand Ballroom.

Benjamin M. Kubit¹ (b.kubit@northeastern.edu), Elizabeth H. Margulis², Kenneth Norman², Petr Janata³; ¹Northeastern University, ²Princeton University, ³University of California, Davis

Involuntary musical imagery (INMI) is a spontaneous, yet common experience, often referred to as an "earworm" or having a song "stuck in your head.” Previous work demonstrated a functional role of INMI in music memory consolidation. However, the neural basis of the spontaneous mental replay of music remains unspecified, as well as whether patterns for recently heard music are replayed in the human brain. Here, we combine models of music perception, multivariate functional magnetic resonance imagining, and machine learning to (1) examine patterns of music-evoked brain activity during perception and imagery, (2) identify epochs of music memory replay during rest, and (3) relate such replay to measures of memory consolidation and self-reported INMI experienced in the scanner. We found reliable patterns of music-evoked activity distributed across sensorimotor, subcortical, and cerebellar brain regions in two sessions for all 36 participants. The same patterns were replayed during rest blocks after music exposure while subjects were not listening to music. While all neural replay did not manifest as INMI, increased replay in the scanner led to an increase in the probability of experiencing INMI later outside of the scanner. Overall, persistent neural replay during both sessions improved music memory across the 2-day delay period, but only for poorly encoded music. Capturing brain activity during INMI provides evidence for the neural underpinnings of a very common form of spontaneous thought in humans and also for the adaptive role of such spontaneous thought as a form of consolidation that can modify long-term memory.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Other