Music’s power to trigger memories has rarely been tested; in particular, it is not clear what mechanisms govern memory retrieval elicited by musical cues. Previous research has suggested that memory retrieval is underpinned by two mechanisms: (1) distinctiveness—the probability that a cue will retrieve a memory declines with the number of stimuli previously encoded with that same cue and (2) incongruence—a cue encoded with emotionally incongruent targets triggers more memories of the stimuli associated with it than a cue encoded with emotionally congruent stimuli. Our participants experienced an implicit encoding phase where they were presented with auditory-visual pairs of stimuli (pieces of music and images of facial expressions). In the retrieval phase, participants were asked to remember encoded stimuli triggered by music. As expected, musical cues encoded with emotionally incongruent facial expressions triggered more memories than cues encoded with congruent facial expressions. Contrary to our prediction and to previous findings, music from distinctive pairs of stimuli triggered fewer memories than cue pairs displayed multiple times in the encoding phase. Our finding suggests that the manipulation of stimuli at encoding is crucial when using musical cues to trigger memories.

很少有人测试过音乐触发记忆的能力。特别是，不清楚音乐线索引发的记忆提取的机制是什么。先前的研究表明，记忆提取由两种机制支持：（1）独特性——线索提取记忆的可能性随着先前用相同线索编码的刺激数量而下降；（2）不一致——用情感编码的线索与情感一致的刺激编码的线索相比，不一致的目标会触发更多与其相关的刺激的记忆。我们的参与者经历了一个隐式编码阶段，在这个阶段他们会看到成对的听觉-视觉刺激（音乐片段和面部表情图像）。在检索阶段，参与者被要求记住由音乐触发的编码刺激。正如预期的那样，用情绪不一致的面部表情编码的音乐线索比用一致的面部表情编码的线索触发更多的记忆。与我们的预测和之前的发现相反，来自不同刺激对的音乐触发的记忆比在编码阶段多次显示的提示对少。我们的发现表明，在使用音乐线索触发记忆时，对编码刺激的操纵是至关重要的。