Sing a song

I have kept asking myself this question: why I feel using just a little effort to remember a whole piece of lyrics after I recall the first or first few words? 

When I am reading the book written by Dr. Lawrence Barsalou, specifically the Chapter 6 dedicated to “long-term memory” encoding, I found the above question partially addressed. I admit that a person may listen to a song many times; as basically, she/he must very much enjoy it for some reason. In that sense, the amount of processing on the lyrics is improved by presentation duration, the chances to rehearse, and the number of presentations. Those three variables are found to be the significant factors determining the information processing quality. 

What appears more interesting to me is the sort of elaboration that contributes to data encoding: first, incidental versus intentional learning. Human beings are in fact ready to encode any information without "realizing" it. Although there is a benefit for us to try to remember something, because it may result in increasing number of rehearsals, but it is not fair to say that the information cannot be learned well, because people are not inducing to do so.  When we are listening to a favorite song, of course, it is fine for us to try hard to remember the lyrics word by word, but let us think about it again, how many times you found yourself practicing the song perfectly without the intention to memorize. Second, the depth of information processing. If you are given a stimulus such as a car’s engine part that you have never seen before, how can you restore it? Well, ideally, you may develop a set of characteristics pertaining to that objective stimulus, with those characteristics becoming more conceptual, the stimulus will be remembered better. In fact, when you try to recall that stimulus later, the previous generated conceptual information will be activated and retrieved as well. Applying this point to explaining my question, each word in the lyrics relates to another, and they come together to form a meaning that musicians want to convey. I can say I still recall a song easily from a decade ago, as it is my favorite one from my favorite show. When I retrieve the lyrics, I can still perceive its meaning to the show. In addition, I am wondering whether the rhythm helps extending the depth, although it is different type of information, the phonological loop could be affected by it, as we sing out individual word with the sound. Third, imagery, in other word, you can visualize the information, which may produce more conceptual information to elaborate. For example, you are asked to remember “subway airport”, then you can picture a scene that “a CTA blue line subway is heading to the Chicago O’Hare airport.” It does not have to be that rich decorations attached to the original materials, yet we see an improvement in remembering. Again, going back to my question of interest, as I said before, I am able to play back a portion of the show (e.g. the main characters get back together), as the lyrics correspond to the story quite well; in the meanwhile, some words can be transformed to real objects (e.g. river, horse)  from the show. 

The reason why my question is partially un-addressed at this point is that: are the lyrics stored as a whole in a chunk? or divided into several chunks with some special “linkage”? Because when we succeed in recalling or recognizing the first one or two word, the rest is usually flowing out like a river. Perhaps people will say it is up to individual depending on her or his capacity and strategy to encode information. :)


Reference:

Lawrence W. Barsalou. (1992) Cognitive Psychology, An overview for Cognitive Scientists , Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0-89859-966-0


(© 2012 Miaoqi Zhu)