Preferred J-pop music and visual memory retrieval: an exploratory pilot fMRI study

Listening to music while studying is common, yet it remains unclear whether self-selected popular music facilitates or interferes with memory performance. This exploratory pilot fMRI study examined whether preferred Japanese pop music (J-Pop), compared with unpleasant sounds and a no-sound baseline, was descriptively associated with differences in visual memory retrieval, subjective focus, and regional brain activity in healthy young adults. Five participants completed a visual encoding and retrieval task under three auditory conditions during fMRI. Behavioral performance, focus ratings, and region-of-interest (ROI) activity in the anterior insula and temporo-occipital visual association cortex were examined using descriptive statistics and nonparametric analyses. Descriptively, recall accuracy and subjective focus were highest in the preferred J-Pop condition, intermediate in the no-sound condition, and lowest in the unpleasant condition; however, these differences did not reach statistical significance. Exploratory ROI analyses showed that anterior insula activity was descriptively higher during the J-Pop condition, whereas temporo-occipital visual association cortex activity was descriptively highest during unpleasant sounds, intermediate during J-Pop, and lowest during the no-sound condition. Brain-behavior correlations were also exploratory and should be interpreted cautiously given the very small sample size. These findings do not establish that preferred J-Pop improves memory performance or supports a specific neural mechanism. Rather, they suggest that this paradigm is feasible and may be useful for generating hypotheses about how affectively positive, self-selected music relates to visual memory retrieval, subjective focus, and salience-related neural processing in future adequately powered studies.