TABLE 1 – Descriptive Statistics for Musical Mind-Pops Recorded in Periods 1, 2 and 3

1. When do Christmas songs pop into your mind?: Testing a long-term priming hypothesis Lia Kvavilashvili and Susan H. Anthony, University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom TABLE 2 – Percentage (Frequency) of Xmas and Non-Xmas Mind-Pops Reported as Being Encountered/not Encountered Recently INTRODUCTIONWhat are musical mind-pops?Musical mind-pops refer to melodies and songs that spontaneously come to mind without any attempt to recall them, and often surprise us with their irrelevance to the current situation (e.g., when a student starts humming American National Anthem while sitting in an exam). They form a part of a broader phenomenon of Involuntary Semantic Memories or mind-pops, which are isolated fragments of our semantic knowledge (e.g., a word or someone’s name, a visual image of something or a song/melody) that come to mind unexpectedly, often without obvious triggers (Kvavilashvili & Mandler, 2004). Musical mind-pops and repetitive “earworms”Although mind-pops are predominantly one-off occurrences, occasionally they can come to mind repeatedly, and may be difficult to get rid of. Recurring melodies and songs have recently been studied under a variety of names such as “earworms”, “stuck song syndrome” (Beaman & Williams, 2010; Williamson et al., 2012) and involuntary musical imagery (INMI) (Liikkanen, 2012). However, the focus of the present investigation is on ordinary one-off involuntary musical mind-pops.Why do we have mind-pops? – Long-term priming hypothesisInitial diary studies by Kvavilashvili and Mandler (2004) have shown that on almost 50% of recorded cases participants reported that they had encountered the content of their mind-pop in the recent past (i.e., minutes, hours, days and weeks ago). This finding gave rise to the long-term priming hypothesis which states that stimuli (words, objects, places, music, etc.) encountered in everyday life subconsciously activate corresponding and related representations for relatively long periods of time and, if later, some accidental cues further re-activate a particular, already active, representation it may result in conscious experience of the mind-pop. CONCLUSIONS 1. Results 3 and 4 support the hypothesis by showing that chance encounters with familiar musical stimuli enhance the activation levels of their representations which can last for several hours and days and subsequently result in conscious experience of relevant pieces of music (i.e., musical mind-pops). 2. These findings replicate and extend the results of Coane and Balota (2009), who showed that reaction times to Christmas related words (e.g., reindeer, nutcracker) were faster during the Christmas period than during other seasons (e.g., in summer), due to increased everyday exposure to Christmas related words at this time of the year. In fact, the present study was inspired by the results of Coane and Balota (2009). 3. Taken together, results have important implications for research on priming and implicit memory by demonstrating the effects of long term priming in everyday life with musical stimuli. RESULTS - Main findings 1. Frequency of recorded musical mind-pops On average, 15 participants recorded about 8 musical mind-pops in each of the three 1-week periods, hence, the main effect of time period was not significant (F<1) (see Table 1). 2. Ordinary musical mind-pops or repetitive ‘earworms”? In all three time-periods, the majority of the musical mind-pops (59%) did not repeat (i.e., were recorded only once). Only 11% of mind-pops were additionally recorded on the same day for three or more times, with a maximum repetition of 10 times in one case. This is in line with previous questionnaire (Liikkanen, 2012) and diary (Beaman & Williams, 2010) studies which reported, on average, only one repetitive ‘earworm’ per week. 3. Long-term priming of Christmas musical mind-pops (I) Table 1 (lower panel) shows that 21.87% of all recorded mind-pops in December were Christmas songs/melodies (n=28), while no Christmas songs were recorded in November and only one recorded in February. The difference between the mean proportions of recorded Christmas mind-pops was significant (Friedman’s c2 (2, 15) = 21.41, p < .0001), providing support for the long-term priming hypothesis. 4. Long-term priming of Christmas musical mind-pops (II) Further evidence for priming comes from the data in Table 2, which show that while 82% of Christmas songs recorded in December were reported to have been encountered recently (i.e., were primed), only 32% of non Christmas musical mind-pops were reported to be primed by recent encounter.   TABLE 1 – Descriptive Statistics for Musical Mind-Pops Recorded in Periods 1, 2 and 3 AIMS AND HYPOTHESIS OF THE STUDY The aim was to test the long-term priming hypothesis by asking participants to record their musical mind-pops over 7-day periods before Christmas (early November), during Christmas (15-22 December) and after Christmas (early February). Given that participants would be exposed to Christmas related music in December, it was predicted that participants would record significantly more Christmas songs in December than in November or February. DIARY METHOD Participants– Seventeen volunteers (5 males and 12 females), with a mean age of 28.12 (SD = 12.30, range 19-50 years) took part. The majority (80%) of participants were students whilst the others worked full time. The data of two participants were excluded as they did not complete the diary in all three periods. Procedure – Participants recorded their musical mind-pops in an A5 size paper diaries on three different time periods: Period 1 (pre Christmas) - 31 October to 6 November 2011 Period 2 (Christmas) – 15 December to 21 December 2011 Period 3 (post Christmas) – 13 February to 19 February 2012 Every time participants experienced a musical mind-pop they filled in a questionnaire presented on a diary page. This involved describing the content of the mind pop, activities at the time, and triggers. Long-term priming was examined by asking if the contents of the mind- pop had been encountered recently and if so when and where. To assess the frequency of repetitive musical mind-pops or earworms, participants were asked to tick boxes in the diary if they had experienced the same mind pop more than once on the same day. References Beaman, C. P., & Williams, T. I. (2010). Earworms (‘stuck song syndrome’): Towards a natural history of intrusive thoughts. British Journal of Psychology, 101, 637-653.   Coane, J. H. & Balota, D. A. (2009). Priming the holiday spirit: Persistent activation due to extraexperimental experiences. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 1124-1128. Kvavilashvili, L. & Mandler, G. (2004). Out of one's mind: A study of involuntary semantic memories. Cognitive Psychology, 48, 47-94. Liikkanen, L. A. (2012). Musical activities predispose to involuntary musical imagery. Psychology of Music, 40, 236-256. Williamson, V. J., Jilka, S. R., Fry, J., Finkel, S., Mullensiefen, D., & Stewart L. (2012). How do “earworms” start? Classifying the everyday circumstances of involuntary musical imagery. Psychology of Music, 40, 259-284. Acknowledgements We wish to thank Tanya Gasperl for technical assistance and the following researchers for their input in data collection, transcription and data entry: Samantha Wraight, Francesca Spong, Adila Hssain, Danielle James, Jane Tai, Chin Nian Tan, and Jashiccah Arasilango. Poster presented at the 53rd Annual Meeting of Psychonomic Society, 16 November, 2012, Minneapolis, Minnesota, US. Email: L.Kvavilashvili@herts.ac.uk