Mustafa Kaya

Research Student

Research Program: Music Science

Thesis Title

The Musical Escape: Investigating Music and Imagination.

Research Project

Mental imagery plays a pivotal role in action planning, recreation, and psychotherapeutic clinical applications, especially in cognitive behavioural therapies. Vividness, sentiment, and content of such mental imagery can have a substantial impact on the outcome of recreational and clinical applications. Supporting mental imagery by boosting or attenuating it depending on the purpose can improve the efficiency of such applications. Recent research showed that music evokes and affects the nature of mental imagery; hence, it is a promising tool to study and support practical applications of mental imagery.

The overarching goal of the present project is to identify and understand the effects of a literature-guided subset of musical features on the vividness of imagined content in a directed visual imagery task. The human voice is uniquely situated in its effects on cognition and perception. The specific focus of the project is on the impact of human voice, vocals, lyrics and related variables on imagination in terms of their impact on imagined vividness, the sentiment of the imagined content, as well as temporal and spatial properties of it.

Qualifications

• BA and MA in Psychology

Publications

For a full listing of my publications, please visit my Google Scholar page.

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