Recognition memory in movie scenes: the soundtrack induces mood-coherent bias, but not through mood induction

Several studies have employed music to affect various tasks through mood induction procedures. In this perspective, music’s emotional content coherently affects the listeners’ mood, which, in turn, affects performance. On the contrary, in film music cognition, schema theories suggest that music adds semantic information that interacts with the viewers’ previous knowledge and influences visual information processing. As in this interpretation the viewers’ mood is not deeply considered, it is not clear the extent to which music effects are also due to its power of affecting the viewers’ mood or rather a mere cognitive priming-like influence. An experiment (N = 169) on how music biases the recognition memory of a scene was built comparing semantic and emotional effects of soundtracks differing in valence (happy vs scary) during a recognition task. The results show that 1) music affected the viewers’ mood coherently with its valence, 2) music led to falsely recognise unseen objects as truly present when coherent with the soundtrack valence; and 3) the effect of music on the biased remembering was not mediated by the viewers’ mood, thus suggesting a strong interpretation of the schema theory in film music processing. Finally, a methodological reflection is provided on the issue of the manipulation check in experiments that employ musical stimuli to assess their influence on cognition.