The organisation of musical semantic memory: Evidence from false memories for familiar songs
By adapting a well-known paradigm for studying memory for words—the Deese-Roediger-McDermott or DRM paradigm (Deese, 1959, Roediger & McDermott, 1995)—the two experiments reported here explore memory for song titles and song clips. Participants were presented with five
song titles (Experiment 1a) or five 30-second song clips (Experiment 1b) for each of nine popular artists (e.g., Robbie Williams). The most popular song identified for each artist in a pilot task was omitted from the sets of titles/clips. Following a distractor task, participants were asked
to write down as many of the songs as they could recall. They were also asked to return a week later and complete a second recall task. Participants falsely recalled a significant number of the related but non-presented songs in both experiments and this increased a week later, while correct
recall for presented items decreased. The results are discussed in terms of theory for musical memory as well as in the context of providing a novel method for exploring the organisation of musical memory.
Keywords: DRM paradigm; False memory; Familiar songs; Free recall; Musical memory
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: School of Psychology, Keele University, UK
Publication date: 03 October 2014
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