Semantic Categorization of Unfamiliar Tunes in Older and Younger Adults

The process of learning the categories of new tunes in older and younger adults was examined for this study. Tunes were presented either one or three times along with a category name to see if multiple repetitions aid in category memory. Additionally, toexamine if an association may help some listeners, especially older ones, to better remember category information, some tunes were presented with a short associative fact; this fact was either neutral or emotional. Participants were tested on song recognition,fact recognition, and category memory. For all tasks, there was a benefit of three presentations. There were no age differences in fact recognition. For both song recognition and categorization, the memory burden of a neutral association was lessened when the association was emotional.