The Influence Of Music Tempo On Inhibition Control:A Behavioral And Electrophysiological Study

Music plays an important role in daily life because its influence cannot be ignored.Music was multi-dimensional.Music tempo,as a representative of the basic dimensions of music received extensive attention in previous studies.It has been found from previous studies that music tempo has obvious effect on individual behavior and cognitive control.However,few studies have systematically investigated the effect of music tempo on inhibition control and the neural mechanisms from the aspects of inhibition control,that is,response inhibition and interference control.Therefore,this study attempts to reveal the influence of music tempo on individuals' inhibition ability through behavioral and electroencephalogram experiments.The Go/No-go paradigm was used in the first study.Four color blocks of different shapes of ‘red',‘green',‘blue' and ‘yellow' as novel stimuli,which unrelated to the task.The results showed that the main effect of music tempo was significant to the reaction time of Go trials.The reaction time of medium-spaced music(104bpm)was the longest,and the reaction time of medium-spaced music was significantly different from the other three tempos.The classic Stroop paradigm was used in study 2.The results showed that the main effect of music tempo was not significant in related indexes of accuracy and reaction time.Study 3 adopted the classic Go/No-go paradigm to record the brain activity of the subjects when they completed the inhibition control task under slow(54 bpm),mediumspaced(104 bpm),fast(154bpm)and no music conditions.The behavior results showed that accuracies for No-go trials were lower in the fast than in slow tempo music conditions,while the accuracies for Go trials were also lower in the fast tempo than in no music conditions.The ERP results showed that larger N2 and P3 amplitudes were elicited by No-go than by Go conditions.Moreover,the difference N2(N2d)amplitudes observed by No-go versus Go condition were larger in fast music than in medium-paced,slow and no music conditions,indicating more consumption of cognitive resources in the process of conflict monitoring under the fast music condition.However,no such differences were observed among medium-paced,slow and no music conditions.In addition,the difference P3(P3d)amplitudes,an index of response inhibition,were not significant among these four music conditions.Above all,these findings indicated that:(1)music tempo affects the individual's response inhibition control,not the interference inhibition;(2)tempo had a detrimental influence on individuals' ability of conflict monitoring.However,the tempo of music didn't affect the later response inhibition.More specifically,listening to fast music might impair individual's ability to monitor conflict when performing the inhibitory control task.These findings provide behavioral and cognitive neuroscience evidence for the effects of music tempo on the individuals' ability of inhibition control.