Faculty and Student Present at UK’s U of Kent Virtual Conference
Dr. David Berry, Dr. Don Scott, and Katherine Bobbett ’20 presented their poster, “How Earworms Are Born: An EEG Study of Original Melodies That May Come to Stick in the Brain” at the ‘Brain, Cognition, Emotions, and Music (BCEM) — The Quartet With a Missing Link’ conference. The day and a half conference was organized by the University of Kent’s Canterbury Campus.
The presentation also included a live, online Q&A session where they discussed the experiment behind researching “earworms” — when a tune resides in the head and cannot be easily shaken. The experiment explored which melodic features lead to earworms and how the brain responds to those features.
Berry, Scott and Bobbet were scheduled to present their study at the Southeastern Psychological Association (SEPA) annual meeting in May, but the event was canceled due to COVID-19. SEPA instead opted to hold a series of virtual events online, and their study is now available in a digital repository for public viewing.