Do matching sounds help us remember objects later?
Hearing a matching, task-irrelevant sound when looking at an object makes you more likely to vividly recollect it later.
Source
Object memory is multisensory: Task-irrelevant sounds improve recollection
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Object encoding with vs without task-irrelevant sounds; recollection at test
- N
- N=66 · 75 UC Davis students; 9 excluded for below-chance accuracy (preregistered)
- Population
- University of California, Davis undergraduates
- Outcome
- Object recollection with versus without task-irrelevant sounds at encoding
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Inspect source passages
Do matching sounds help us remember objects later?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
three experiments
Across three experiments using different methods to estimate recollection and familiarity, we found converging evidence that congruent multisensory information during encoding enhances subsequent recollection.
66 participants analyzed
To account for poor testing conditions associated with online data collection, we doubled this number to 66, and data were collected until we reached this point post-exclusion.
What they did
The researchers conducted three experiments with undergraduate students (with 66 analyzed per experiment) to see how sounds affect visual memory. In the initial experiment, participants made size judgments on visual objects presented for 400 milliseconds alongside congruent, incongruent, or control sounds, followed by a surprise recognition test. The second experiment separated memory into recollection and familiarity using specialized confidence ratings, while the final experiment tested memory for the sounds themselves.
What they found
Congruent sounds consistently boosted memory performance, yielding an average recognition area under the curve of 0.82 compared to 0.80 for incongruent sounds. Further analysis revealed this boost was driven specifically by recollection, which showed a strong effect size of 0.15, whereas familiarity showed almost no effect at 0.02. Participants were also much better at identifying the exact sound paired with congruent items.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The findings are limited to college students tested in an online environment, which may not represent memory processes in broader populations. Additionally, the study does not rule out whether other sensory pairings, like visual and tactile cues, would yield similar recollection benefits. The researchers also noted that very brief exposure times might change how sensory processing influences memory.
Key terms
- Recollection
- The retrieval of specific, detailed contextual information about a past event, such as when or where it occurred.
- Familiarity
- A general, strength-based sense of knowing an item was encountered before without retrieving specific contextual details.
- Semantic Congruency
- The meaningful agreement or compatibility between two different stimuli, such as seeing a dog and hearing a bark.
- Perceptual Fluency
- The ease with which a sensory stimulus is processed by the brain during perception or encoding.
- Dual-Process Model
- A theoretical framework proposing that recognition memory is supported by two distinct processes: recollection and familiarity.
- Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC)
- A graphical plot that illustrates the diagnostic ability of a binary classifier system as its discrimination threshold is varied.
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Quiz yourself
How have traditional cognitive studies of recognition memory typically presented stimuli to participants?
Common questions
Did participants know their memory would be tested?
No, the surprise recognition test was entirely unexpected, as participants were told to focus on judging whether the objects would fit inside a suitcase.
Why were some images presented with visual noise?
Visual noise was used to make the objects harder to see, which helped prevent participants from scoring perfectly and allowed researchers to test if the sound benefit was purely about making fuzzy images clearer.
Did mismatched sounds actively harm object memory?
No, although congruent sounds improved memory, there was no consistent evidence that incongruent sounds performed significantly worse than meaningless control sounds.
Does this study suggest that playing music helps people study?
Not exactly, because the memory boost was specific to sounds that directly matched the visual object (like a dog barking while seeing a dog), rather than general background music.
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