The Influence Of Background Music On Working Memory

With the development of electronic techonology,people are more likely to be exposed to music,the music started to become a very important part in people's lives.Many people likely to listen to music while working and learning,listening to the music is not the main activities,but as a subsidiary to improve the environment of learning and studying.In view of the widespread of this kind of phenomenon,the influence of backgroud music on individual cognitive activities has been paid more and more attention by researchers at home and abroad,but the research on this topic is still controversial.Some studies suggest that music can soothe emotions, make focuse on one's attention, so as to improve the work efficiency of learning, but some studies has shown that background music likes other irrelevant sound stimulus,it will occupy a certain amount of cognitive resources, while cognitive resources are limited, so background music will cause a disruptive effect on the current task and reduce performance.Research on working memory is an important part of the field of cognitive research. We need further research to explore the background music is to promote or interfere with the working memory.There are two types of working memory, one is verbal working memory, and another is spatial working memory. By reading the previous data found that, in the past research, many studies about the effect of background music on working memory is focused on verbal working memory, but very few study is on spatial working memory.Through two experiments,this study attempts to investigate the effects of different background music on the verbal working memory and spatial working memory.Experimental study adopt n-back paradigm, both two experiments were 2(Memory Load levels: low load level, high load level) × 5(Background music Conditions: fast-paced music at high volume, fast-paced music at low volume, slow-paced music at high volume, slow-paced music at low volume,no music) mixed design, background music condition is between-subjects variable,memory load level is within-subject variable.Respectively,two experiments were discussed the effect of background music on verbal working memory conditions and the effect of background music conditions on spatial working memory.Through the above researches, results summarized as follows:1.Background music and memory load level have a significant interaction impact on the correct rate of working memory(verbal and spatial).At low load memory tasks, the effect of different background music on working memory tasks correct rate is not significant; under high load memory tasks, the effect of different background music on working memory tasks correct rate is significant.Specific performance: fast-paced music at low volume and slow-paced music at high volume of background music can improve people's working memory(verbal, spatial) accuracy, and fast-paced music at high volume and slow-paced music at low volume can decrease people's working memory accuracy.2.The effects of background music and memory load level on the reaction time of working memory(verbal and spatial) do not exist interaction.Under background music conditions of fast-paced music at low volume and fast-paced music at high volume, working memory(verbal, spatial) reaction time were significantly shorter than under music background conditions of slow-paced music at low volume and slow-paced music at high volume and non music.Under background music conditions of slow-paced music at low volume and slow-paced music at high volume,working memory(verbal, spatial) reaction time were significantly longer than under background music conditions of non music.3.The main effect of memory load levels on working memory tasks(verbal, spatial) was significant: under low memory load level, the correct rate of working memory tasks was significantly higher than correct rate of working memory tasks under high memory load; under high memory load level, the reaction time of working memory tasks is significantly longer than the reacrion time of working memory task under low memory load level.