Feeling-of-knowing for familiar and unfamiliar melodies and titles in episodic memory tasks

Three experiments were used to determine whether varying the familiarity and instrumentation of melodies affects people's memory and metamemory in episodic memory tasks. Participants were presented with the title/melody pairs, then asked to recall the target when given the title or the melody as a cue, or give a feeling of knowing rating if recall failed. Results showed that across all experiments, participants were better at recalling titles than melodies. Furthermore, instrumentation appeared to affect participants' metamemory accuracy for titles and melodies; when the music was the simple one line melody participants were more accurate with their predictions for melodies than titles, but when given full orchestral music participants were no more accurate when given titles versus given melodies. Finally, these experiments gave evidence for verbal mediation in a non-verbal task, evidenced by Expertise data where people who knew more "real" title information were better at recalling titles and melodies.