Music and the Encoding Specificity Principle

By Alisha Varghese, 2025-2026 Student Executive Committee Marketing Manager
April 29th, 2026

While preparing for a test, it is commonly advised to replicate one’s testing environment, an idea which comes from the encoding specificity principle. The encoding specificity principle states that when the context in which something is learned is reinstated, it can help facilitate memory recall. A study surveying 44,000 individuals around the world by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry revealed that the average weekly time spent listening to music was 20.1 hours in 2022, an increase from the 18.34 hours spent listening in 2021 (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, 2022). With the growing global presence of music in today’s world, it is important to examine its application to other fields. Specifically, research investigating the impact of music on memory can uncover the potential use of music as a beneficial memorization tool. Thus, further studies on how music relates to the encoding specificity principle is essential. There has already been some research in this field, but current studies have lacked examination of the teenage population.

Literature Review:

This brings me to a review of the current literature. First, among the various music and memory studies, three main perspectives have emerged: music has a positive impact, negative impact, or makes no real difference on memory performance. A study by Muhammed Azmi and teammates from the Multimedia University found that utilizing different tempos of music for certain memory tasks could enhance performance, showcasing how music can be controlled to stimulate beneficial outcomes for memory. Additionally, studies by Dr. Nicola Mamerella and colleagues and Psychologist Susan Hallam utilized the arousal-and-mood hypothesis to justify their findings of positive effects of music on memory. The arousal-and-mood hypothesis states that listening to music helps boost one’s mood which, in turn, improves cognitive processes like memory.

However, other research has found negative effects of music on memory. Dr. Alessandra Souza and Luis Barbosa found that music containing lyrics had detrimental effects on both visual and verbal memory of participants. Similarly, Professor Thomas Alley and Marcie Greene from Clemson University discovered that music with lyrics had a negative effect on working memory since the musical stimulus was competing with the memory task for phonological loop processing. The phonological loop is a system that stores and manipulates sounds and is used to maintain information in short-term memory. Music with lyrics required use of this loop, inhibiting its use for the memory task and acting as a distraction in both studies. 

The final category is studies that have found that music made no real difference in memory performance. For instance, the aforementioned studies of Souza and Barbosa and Alley and Greene had found negative effects of music with lyrics on memory, but they also discovered that there was little difference in the performance of the instrumental music condition and the silent condition. Additionally, one experiment by Dr. Marco Calabria and coworkers tested the arousal-and-mood hypothesis and found that the level of arousal of the music had a null effect on memory performance. This directly contrasts the findings of Mamerella and Hallam who used the same hypothesis to justify positive results.

Delving more into the field of memory, one specific framework that exists in this area is the encoding specificity principle. This is the idea that when the context in which you learned (or encoded) something is reinstated during recall, it will enhance memory retrieval. The original foundation for this principle was established in the 1970s by studies conducted by Professor Endel Tulving and Donald Thomson. Their initial study presented participants with a list of target words to memorize which were paired with their weak cue, a word with weak association to the target word. Then, participants either recalled the words with no cues, the provided weak cues, or unseen strong cues which are words with strong association to the target words. Even though the strong cues had higher associations with the words, the reinstated weak cues were the best at facilitating memory recall, showcasing that when the stimulus presented at the encoding phase is repeated for the recall phase, memory retrieval is improved which laid the basis for the encoding specificity principle.

The principal's application has been expanded to many diverse fields. For instance, a study by Danielle Yanes and colleagues tested the principle in the context of exercise or rest, and, research by Godden and Baddeley tested memory recall of divers in the context of either land or underwater. In both studies, performance was improved when the context matched for the encoding and recall phase, displaying the growth of the encoding specificity principle to new applications.

Music is another field in which the application of the encoding specificity principle has grown to. A study by Tram Nguyen and Jessica Grahn, along with another experiment from the aforementioned study by Dr. Calabria and coworkers, both found that the encoding specificity principle in the context of reinstated background music did not make a difference in memory performance. Conversely, a study by Dr. Laura Ferreri and associates reveals a positive influence of the principle on memory. They discovered that music can help form associative strategies during the learning process which can then be called upon to help recall when music is reinstated.

Research Gap & Question:

General studies of music and memory have focused on a wide range of age groups from children to older adults. However, within the field of the encoding specificity principle and music, the researched populations have been very limited. Most of them focus on younger and older adults. Therefore, there is a population gap in the current body of knowledge as no research has investigated teenagers. This gap is significant because of teenagers' brain development and their large consumption of music. An article from the National Institute of Mental Health stated that the brain only finishes developing in the mid-to-late twenties, and the prefrontal cortex is one of the areas that matures the latest. The prefrontal cortex plays a crucial role in encoding processes which is a major aspect of the encoding specificity principle. Therefore, it is important to examine the teenage population since their prefrontal cortex is not fully developed which can make a difference in how this subject applies to them. Additionally, a study by Dr. Adrian C. North and colleagues found that adolescents spend 2.45 hours daily listening to music. Given the teenage population’s large consumption of music, it is even more essential to examine the impact that the encoding specificity principle in the context of music has on their memory performance.

Thus, my study sought to apply the principle and music to the teenage population, specifically high schoolers within the range of 14-18 years old, through the question: How does the encoding specificity principle in the context of background music affect the memory performance of high school teenagers?

Method:

My study required an experimental method in order to properly examine the principle’s application to music on high school subjects through a memory test. In total, 36 participants were sampled from grades 9-12 with ages ranging from 14-18. Each participant was randomly assigned to one of three groups using a TI-84 program. The control group had silence in both the encoding and recall phase of the test (S-S). One experimental group had music in the background for the encoding phase and silence during recall (M-S). Finally, the third group had music for both phases (M-M). 

For the procedure, I conducted a modified replication of one of the original encoding specificity principle experiments by Thomson and Tulving. The use of their procedure ensured that the experiment was accurately assessing the encoding specificity principle, but it was modified to be used in the application of background music and tested within a teenager population. The selected memory task was the same word list memory test used in their study. All tested words were taken from List A in their study and are seen in the target word column here. The same word list was administered to all participants to ensure that any differences in performance were not attributed to disparities in the difficulty level of different word lists.

The following procedure was the same for all participants. First, participants were taken to a quiet area with minimal distractions. They were then sent a google form which included initial questions asking about demographic information like grade level, age, and gender. Next, verbal instructions were read aloud. 

Participants in the M-S and M-M groups were provided with wired earbuds to listen to the music and were able to adjust the volume to a comfortable level. The selected music was the 1984 jazz piece called “Crab Walk” by Everything But the Girl. It was used in the study by Ferreri and associates due to its medium arousal quality. This piece was selected for this study for the same quality in order to ensure there weren't any effects on memory performance induced from either low arousal or high arousal music as seen in the arousal-and-mood hypothesis studies.

The encoding phase then began. Participants were shown a video presenting 24 words at a rate of one word every three seconds. Immediately following the end of the presentation, the recall phase began in which participants were given 3 minutes to enter the words into the same Google Form. Every blank required a response, forcing participants to guess if needed.

Results:

For the statistical analysis of the data, I first performed a Shapiro-Wilk normality test. If the value in this significance column, also known as the probability value or p-value, is greater than 0.05, then the data follows a normal distribution. For all three conditions, the p-value was above 0.05 which meant the data was normally distributed. This fulfilled the normality requirement, allowing me to proceed with the one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). 

For the ANOVA, if the p-value is less than 0.05, then the data is statistically significant which means that the observed results were most likely not due to chance and you can reject the null hypothesis. However, my p-value of .890 was greater than the alpha value of 0.05, showcasing that the data was not statistically significant and I failed to reject the null hypothesis which stated that the application of the encoding specificity principle to music would make no difference in teens’ memory performance. Therefore, the main takeaway from my experiment and answer to my original research question was that the encoding specificity principle in the context of background music did not worsen or improve the memory performance of high school teenagers.

This data helps fill in the current teenage population gap in the body of knowledge. Also, my results lined up with the previous studies by Nguyen and Tram and Calabria and colleagues who examined young and older adult populations. They too found that the encoding specificity principle in the context of music did not benefit or hinder their performance. The use of music in the application of the principle had the potential to act as a beneficial memorization tool for teenagers. However, given the results showcasing no beneficial or negative effects, these findings cannot support this possibility.

Limitations:

Along with the discussion of these findings, it is important to consider the potential limitations of my study. First, with the small sample size used, there is a chance for increased variability, and it can be harder to identify true statistical differences, raising the possibility that a true effect may go undetected. Fewer participants also makes the data less generalizable since the small sample may not be able to truly reflect all the groups within the population. Another limitation is the possibility that individual differences in memory performance impacted the data. Participant scores could have been largely affected simply by variations in different individual’s memory abilities. Finally, the teenage population that was examined in this study was high schoolers between the ages of 14 and 18. However, there was not a proportional representation of these different ages. For instance, there was a much lower number of 14 year olds studied than the other ages. This could mean that the sample is not truly representative of the general population since the ages were not proportionally represented. 

Conclusion:

To conclude, this study sought to fill the population gap of teens among the current literature surrounding the encoding specificity principle and its application to music. The final conclusion was that the principle in the context of background music did not improve or worsen memory performance of high school teenagers.

References

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