I’m also grateful for the support from @PrincetonNeuro.bsky.social, and my D-SPAN award from the NINDS. #neuroskyence #psychscisky #BlackInNeuro #BlackSky

Super grateful for support from my amazing collaborators @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social, Janice Chen, @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social, Lisa Margulis, and Uri Hasson.

This work also addresses a cinematic puzzle: Why do some movies linger in our minds? Our work shows one way this can happen, by highlighting how repetition of musical themes may help to promote lasting memories for earlier scenes.

By improving our understanding of how music can evoke – and potentially strengthen – naturalistic memories, this work can inform the development of music-based therapies for memory deficits, for example in aging.

In summary, our study bridges the gap between recent work on episodic memory using naturalistic stimuli and decades of work on music-evoked memory retrieval.

In an exploratory analysis, we checked whether this music-related reactivation extended beyond the DMN. We found specificity to the DMN and visual areas—but not across the whole brain.

As another control, we computed the relationship between reactivation and subsequent memory for the no-music group. When we did this, there was no significant relationship in the DMN; and the music group showed a stronger reactivation–memory link than the no-music group across DMN ROIs.

The findings from this ISC regression analysis suggest that reactivation may have effects on subsequent recall that go beyond the effects of initial encoding strength.

Yes—the effect was numerically weaker in some areas (angular gyrus) but numerically stronger in other areas (posterior medial cortex); both regions remained significant when using a parcel-based searchlight.

Using ISC from the brain regions that predicted subsequent memory in the music group, we regressed ISC out from their reactivation scores, and we asked: do residual reactivation scores still predict memory?

To tease apart these possibilities, we needed a way of measuring initial encoding strength. Prior studies have found that spatial inter-subject correlation (ISC) predicts subsequent memory; we found this in our study also, validating the use of ISC as a measure of initial encoding strength.

One explanation for this result is that neural reactivation causes improved subsequent recall; alternatively, good initial encoding of a scene could lead to both higher reactivation of the scene and better subsequent recall (leading to a correlation, even if no causal relationship was present).

We then split reactivation scores by whether the corresponding scene was later remembered or forgotten.

Main Result: Scenes that were remembered showed significantly higher reactivation in key default mode network (DMN) regions—posterior medial cortex and angular gyrus.

We tracked neural reactivation by comparing activity patterns in the music group (during later music repeats) to patterns in the no-music group (during earlier exposures to the same theme). This gave us a measure of how much non-musical event information was brought back online by the music.

Later on, the same theme plays when Joel and Clementine are out on a lake. Does playing the theme in this scene trigger neural reactivation of the earlier scene, and is the degree of reactivation related to how well participants subsequently remember the earlier scene?

For example, in this scene of the movie, Clementine asks for a Valentine’s Day call and Joel walks away while a musical theme plays…

We also asked whether this reactivation would be associated with better subsequent recall; prior work has shown that retrieval can help memories stick, and we hypothesized that a similar dynamic could be at work here.

The next day, both groups returned and performed spoken free recall for the entire film. We asked: When a musical theme repeated later in the movie, would it reactivate memory for earlier scenes tied to that theme?

We had two groups of participants (n=24 each) watch the full film in the MRI scanner.

🎵 One group saw the movie with the original musical score.
🙉 The other group saw the exact same film with all music removed (dialogue + sound effects intact).