The Influence Of Background Music On Preschool Children's Inhibitory Control And Working Memory

The effect of background music on cognitive activity is a high-profile research topic on the utility of background music.Previous studies have suggested that background music had different effects on different cognitive processing.Existing studies focused on reading field,attention field and so on.Although a few researches have involved working memory,their conclusions were not universal because they concerned different perspectives about background music.In reality,daily life and learning activities of preschool children are based on the participation of working memory and inhibition control.Preschool period is also the critical period that enhances the function of working memory and inhibitory control as well.If we can grasp the scientific effect regularity of background music on preschool children's working memory and inhibition control,it will not only help to select appropriate background music for preschool education,but also provide new perspectives and inspirations for improving cognitive development training of preschool children.This study mainly investigated the functional mechanism of background music on preschool children's working memory and inhibitory control and the adjustment of task difficulty among the rest from key factors(tempo and lyric)of it.This study firstly tested the differentiation effectiveness of task difficulty through pre experiment.Experiment 1 investigated the functional mechanism of tempo of background music on preschool children's working memory and inhibitory control using the Day-Night Stroop paradigm and Working Memory Span paradigm,and also investigated whether task difficulty adjusted them.The results showed that the tempo of background music had interaction with task difficulty: in terms of complex inhibition control and working memory task,preschool children performed the best under the condition of slow tempo of music compared to the condition of fast tempo of music or no music;However,subjects performed the best under the the condition of fast tempo of music with regard to simple inhibition control and working memory task.Based on experiment 1,experiment 2 added the lyric to further explore the functional mechanism of background music information on inhibitorycontrol and working memory which had different levels of difficulty,and also explored whether it had interaction with the rhythm of background music.The results suggested that compared with background music which had lyric,subjects performed better under background music which had no lyric whatever the level of difficulty,suggesting the interference effect of lyric.What's more,it was not found the interaction of lyric of background music and task difficulty.On the whole,in respect to the tempo of background music,the conclusions supported the third theory on the functional mechanism of background music to a great extent.Namely,both the arousal mechanism and distract mechanism co-existed within the process of background music and cognitive activities.The effect of promoting or interfering of background music competed with each other.Finally,the dominant mechanism played a leading role.The cognitive resource occupancy effect played a leading role in terms of complex inhibition control and working memory task.While in simple tasks,the arousal mechanism played a dominant role by counteracting the negative effect caused by consumption of attention resources.In respect to the lyric of background music,preschool children didn't counteract the effect of lyrics information due to the limitations of semantic information understanding and experience.On the contrary,the lyrics information had obvious interference effects on their inhibitory control and working memory.