Music linking Emotions

The aim of the present study was to investigate how auditory background can affect visual process- ing of faces. Reported effects of background music go toward both facilitatory (“Mozart effect”) and interfering consequences, depending on the type of auditory stimulation and concurrent cognitive tasks. Relying on evidence of a preliminary study, here we designed a study using event related po- tentials (ERPs), in order to investigate the neural mechanism of memory encoding for faces during listening to classical music (Čajkovskij), environmental sounds (rain) or silence. Participants were 15 healthy non-musician university students, engaged in an old/new memory task (involving the study of about 400 unknown faces, followed by a recognition phase). Results indicate that listening to music enhances memory recollection of faces. Listening to music led to a better encoding of the visual stimulus (as compared to listening to rain), as indexed by an increased Anterior Nega- tivity. The FN400 prefrontal response recorded during the memory task showed a gradient in its amplitude reflecting face familiarity (with smaller negativities to faces associated with music and larger FN400 to new faces). A swLORETA analysis showed the main involvement of Superior Tem- poral Gyrus (STG) and medial frontal gyrus in the integration of audio-visual information. This data show how listening to touching music enhances memory for faces, probably because of the music emotional content, which, in association with face visual characteristic, makes the memory engram more solid.