Presenter Name:Anne Cabildo

School/Affiliation:Ryerson University

Co-Authors:Dr. Karl Szpunar

Abstract:

Personal and collective memories have recently been investigated with
respect to how they differ from one another. Whereas some have argued that personal
and public event memories interact with one another, and therefore may be stored
together (Brown, 1990; Brown et al., 2016), others argue that these two domains of
memory are dissociable (Klein et al., 2002; Race et al., 2013; Shrikanth & Szpunar,
2020). The purpose of this study was to use popular pieces of music to assess whether
evoking different lifetime periods impacts which personal and public events individuals
remember. Ryerson undergraduate students (N = 42) listened to 24 pieces of music (10
secs each) from 3 distinct time periods (i.e., 2019—the students last year of high
school; 2015—the students last year of elementary school; and 1989—approximately
one decade before the students’ birth). Music was more effective in cueing personal
than public events. Results provided some evidence that musically-evoked lifetime
periods for the years 2015 and 2019 were more successful in bringing to mind personal
than public events from those lifetime periods. However, these results should be
interpreted with caution due to the low number of public memories reported. The
quantity and nature of public events reported is discussed in relation to the mnemonic
organization of personal versus public memories.