Listeners remember music they like.

Emotions have important and powerful effects on cognitive processes. Although it is well established that memory influences liking, we sought to document whether liking influences memory. A series of 6 experiments examined whether liking is related to recognition memory for novel music excerpts. In the general method, participants listened to a set of music excerpts and rated how much they liked each one. After a delay, they heard the same excerpts plus an equal number of novel excerpts and made recognition judgments, which were then examined in conjunction with liking ratings. Higher liking ratings were associated with improved recognition performance after a 10-min (Experiment 1) or 24-hr (Experiment 2) delay between the exposure and test phases. The findings were similar when participants made liking ratings after recognition judgments (Experiments 3 and 6), when possible confounding effects of similarity and familiarity were held constant (Experiment 4), and when a deeper level of processing was encouraged for all the excerpts (Experiment 5). Recognition did not vary as a function of liking for previously unheard excerpts (Experiment 6). The results implicate a direct association between liking and recognition. Considered jointly with previous findings, it is now clear that listeners tend to like music that they remember and to remember music that they like.