ArticleHumanities & social sciences communications2026
Traffic jams: music and traffic noise interact to influence the vividness, sentiment, and spatiotemporal properties of directed mental imagery.
Article in Humanities & social sciences communications, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Micro-variations in timing and loudness affect music-evoked mental imagery.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Solitary silence and social sounds: music can influence mental imagery, inducing thoughts of social interactions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Music and traffic noise are pervasive elements of modern everyday auditory environments. However, their combined effects on higher-order cognitive processes like mental imagery remain unclear. In a directed mental imagery task, 107 participants continued imaginary journeys towards a landmark, responded to prompts about each journey, and provided written descriptions. Each trial had either silence, traffic noise, music, or combined music and noise. Bayesian Mixed-Effects models revealed that compared to silence, music enhanced imagery vividness and emotional sentiment; traffic noise enhanced vividness but not sentiment; and noise combined with music diminished music's effect on emotional sentiment. The auditory context further shaped the physical properties of the imagined content: both music and traffic noise increased the imagined distances travelled, whereas only music extended the imagined time travelled. Furthermore, elevated traffic-related themes occurred in both conditions involving traffic noise. Overall, both music and noise can modulate aspects of mental imagery, influencing its vividness, emotional tone, spatiotemporal properties, and thematic content in complex ways. We discuss the practical implications of these findings for imagery-based therapies.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.