BackgroundMusical training at early age has multiple beneficial effects on cognitive development. It stimulates synaptic plasticity,observed through anatomical, functional and behavioural differences between musicians and non-musicians (Justel & Diaz Abrahan, 2012). Musical training can be either receptive or active- i.e. where the child perceives music and its elements or when he produces music besides perceiving it. Although there is considerable research involving musical training, differences between both kinds of trainings has not been further investigated.One of the cognitive functions that are influenced by the musical training is memory. Previous research shows that memory for emotional items is better than for neutral ones and also that music can modulate memory for emotional items better than for neutral ones (Cordon et al., 2013). There are investigations that evaluate these issues in adults. However, the influence of emotional vs neutral items in pre-schoolers? memory remains poorly understood.AimsThe goal of this study was to evaluate the effect of receptive and active musical training for a period of 4 or 10 weeks, on emotional and neutral visual memory of 4- and 5-year-old children.MethodsOne hundred and eighty 4- and 5-year-old (91, 4) children were musically trained during either 4 or 10 weeks. Before and after the training period they were tested on recognition and free recall of 24 emotional (positive and negative valences) and neutral images (from IAPS protocol). Both tests (free recall and recognition) were run immediately after facing the images and a week late.ResultsResults indicate that children evaluate the emotional pictures as more activating than neutral ones. They remember more emotional images than neutral pictures, being negative images the most remembered pictures [F(2,330)=21.26, p