Music Memory & Forgetting

Some memories don’t need a place or a photo to come rushing back. A few notes are enough. Music is one of the most powerful cues the mind has for retrieving the past, which makes it a uniquely useful tool for studying memory control. It also means music can work against us, since a song stuck in your head is a small, familiar example of a memory we’d sometimes rather not have.

Most memory research relies on static materials, images or words taken in all at once. Music doesn’t work that way. It unfolds over time, note by note, much like life outside the lab. Studying music lets us ask how memory and forgetting work for experiences that are dynamic rather than fixed.

Our lab studies how music becomes linked to other memories, pairing musical pieces with faces or places during learning, then using music as a cue to retrieve them. This lets us ask how a cue in one sensory domain, sound, can pull up a memory formed in another, and how that process differs when the cue itself unfolds over time. We measure this through behavioral accuracy and eye movements, to see how these cross-modal associations are formed, retrieved, and, when unwanted, let go of.