P1-18: The Effect of Background Music on Working Memory

Abstract

Many studies do visual working memory research under sundry sound conditions (Alley & Greene, 2008 Current Psychology 27 277–289; Iwanaga & Ito, 2002 Perceptual Motor Skills 94 1251–1258; Pring & Walker, 1994 Current Psychology 13 165–171). In order to understand more about background music, we modified previous studies to examine how the performance of working memory is affected by four different music conditions. Participants were randomly assigned into two groups to listen to two different pop songs to see if they have the similar effect on the performance of working memory. They were required to do six trials of digit span tasks under each music condition (silence, classical music, non-vocal music, vocal music). After being shown ten digits, each for 800 ms, participants were asked to recall and write down the digits in the correct order within 20 s. The results showed that there was no significant difference between two pop songs. Therefore, data were pooled for further analysis and indicated that there are significant differences and correlations in working memory among the four music conditions. The finding that the effect of non-vocal music affects working memory is greater in this study than in that of western films (Alley & Greene, 2008; Pring & Walker, 1994), which is consistent with the previous study in Japan (Iwanaga & Ito, 2002). The application of this study will be discussed in detail.