Running head: MUSICAL DISTRACTION ON COGNITIVE

Effects of Pop Music on Cognitive Task Performance Cognition (PSY 323) Miss Uma Nagalingam Spring 2013 SEGi College Subang Jaya, Upper Iowa University

Kwan Ting An, Justin Lee Ee-Rene, Joevy Liau Thsun Cheng, Jacky Lim Kah Yen Madhanaa Kumar a/l Mohan

SCSJ-0009556 SCSJ-0007918 SCSJ-0008856 SCSJ-0009218 SCSJ-0009540

Running head: MUSICAL DISTRACTION ON COGNITIVE Abstract The current study looked at the distracting effects of pop music on cognitive test

performance college students. A total of 42 participants in SEGi College Subang Jaya were recruited in this research. Brain X-Trainer, developed by Matroll Group of Companies, was used as test sample in the research. It consists of 10 test items and 25 questions about memory retention. Test items were displayed for 5 seconds and 5 seconds duration for response to be recorded. Analysis revealed that the presence of background music lower the attention of participants while carrying out a cognitive task.

Running head: MUSICAL DISTRACTION ON COGNITIVE Effects of Pop Music on Cognitive Task Performance

Living in 21 century, people are immersed in a world that full of technologies and it makes easier to be accessed in to different types of media. The students are being influenced by culture like doing their homework and playing the music at the same time. However, music can be a form of distraction when it comes to cognitive task ability. But there is a contradictory when Schoenhals,(2004) mentioned that employees had considered music as a form of enhancement to workplaces effectiveness and productiveness. This research is to prove the stigma correct in people that says background music as a form of distraction while doing cognitive relevant task. The cognitive task ability of attention is researchers focus area in this research. Attention is the ability to maintain the focus or concentration to particular objects, thoughts and actions (Michelon, 2006). Therefore, the main research question here is that whether background music affects cognitive performance in individual? Kahnemans limited-capacity theory suggests that attention can be allocated freely among different concurrent activities and attention increased or decreased base on the arousal level of each activity. It also states that the amount of attention which able to be deployed at a time is limited. Therefore, this theory has provided a theoretical base for us to determine the how the music actually potentially distracts a person while doing a cognitive task. According to Darowski, Helder, Zacks, Hasher & Hambrick (2008), the capability to ignore or control the processing of distracting information may be related to age and individuals differences in cognitive abilities. Darowski et al. (2008) conducted a study with a large sample of adults aged 18 to 87 years old in examining the role of distraction control in the relationship between age and higher order cognition. The research has shown has shown that age is a factor

Running head: MUSICAL DISTRACTION ON COGNITIVE

for declines in higher- order cognition. However, further research is needed to establish the construct validity of the task because the measures of comprehension accuracy were not reliable. Research by Cosman and Vecera (2012) suggests that the ability to ignore task-irrelevant information and overcome distraction is critical to our ability to efficiently carry out a number of tasks. One factor shown to strongly influence distraction is the perceptual load of the task being performed. 18 undergraduates participated in the research for course credit. Further research needs to be done to determine whether perceptual load of the task is the single dominant factor to distraction. There is a need to recruit more participants to prove the validity and reliability of the results. Unsworth, McMillan, Brewer & Spillers (2012) examined that there is a noticeable individual difference in everyday attention failures. Participants were all undergraduate students completing several of cognitive ability measures in the laboratory and recording everyday attention failures in a diary over the course of a week. Some of the activities included reading sentences while trying to remember a set of unrelated letters. The majority of attention failures were failures of distraction or mind wandering in education contexts. Future work is needed to be done to examine how the current results able to generalize to a more representative sample and how individual differences in everyday attention failures are related to other important cognitive constructs. In past research, Phillips and Lesperance (2003) stated that there is an age differences in electrical brain activity when reading text with distractors. The older adults are more incapable than young adults in overlooking task-related information when being measured by N400 ERP. This experiment involved 40 participants fair distributed between older and young adults. However, the result is not strong enough to prove that older adults have more difficulties as both

Running head: MUSICAL DISTRACTION ON COGNITIVE

older adults and younger adults show similar results. There are several limitations like the number of the participants and the duration of the experiment. Future researchers should increase the number of participants to hundreds and provide a longer break to the participants at every interval as short break might create confounding effect. Besides that, Murphy, Craik, Li, and Schneider (2000) compared the effects of aging and background noise on short-term memory performance. In the research, a total of 15 young adults of the University of Toronto, who had completed an average of 15 years of education and 15 older adults, residents of the Mississauga community, who had completed an average of 14 years of education, were recruited. It was found that older adults in quiet place performed the same as younger adults in a noisy environment, and younger adults in a noisy setting performed poorly compared to those in a quiet location. However, gender was not taken count as a variable whereby it might make a difference to yield a conclusive outcome. On the other hand, Tze (2010) has carried out a research in order to determine the relationship of the background and the concentration among the college students. The whole research was taken place in a medium sized college in Taiwan. 133 of the college from the technical division were recruited in order to assess their level of concentration by using the reading comprehension from the TOEFL preparation manual. There were 2 focuses during this study. First, the researchers were trying to find out whether listening music will affect task performance such as reading. Second, the researches was trying to assess by using two different genre of song in order to determine whether there were any variation for the results. The results showed the positive relationship in between the cognitive task and types of background music. Limitation that occurred during the research was the sampling method as the students might used

Running head: MUSICAL DISTRACTION ON COGNITIVE

to ignore the music while doing the reading task. Therefore, future researcher could use random sample to recruit the participants. This objective of the study is to determine the effect of pop music on cognitive task performance of college students. The presence of pop music to the participants would be accounted as independent variable whereby, the dependent variable would be the cognitive task performance. The number of participants, duration of both tests and types of music played are in controlled. It is hypothesized that if background music is present, the lower the attention of participants towards cognitive task. The main goal of this study is to determine whether the music is the factor of distraction to cognitive task performance. The participants will be requested to answer an answer sheet with 25 questions. The questions are actually based on a software program called Brain X Factor to test the memory and examine the students memorizing skills under 2 different environments. Throughout the goals of this study, a research questions emerged: Does music distract the students when doing cognitive relevant tasks?

Running head: MUSICAL DISTRACTION ON COGNITIVE Methodology Participants

Researchers recruited participants aged in between 18 to 25 in SEGi College Subang Jaya to participate in the study. There were a total of 42 participants consist of male and female college students. Measurement Materials Brain X-Trainer was used by the researchers as test sample in the research. The Brain XTrainer was developed by Matroll Group of Companies. The corporation is responsible for developing products and services for the Selangor Department of Education. Brain X-Trainer consists of 10 test items and 25 questions about memory retention. Test items are displayed for 5 seconds and 5 seconds duration for response to be recorded. Researchers also used the socio-demographic details to collect data on the participants gender and age. Procedure On the day of experiment, researchers have the consent from Ms. Uma to recruit her class students as participants in the research. Participants were filtered accordingly to the age group and be informed about the nature of the research. Then participants were given a briefing about the nature of experiments. Participants are required to memorize 10 test items to be recall later in the research. Responses are recorded immediately after all the 10 items were displayed to the participants. Participants then fill in their responses on a paper distributed by the researchers. The experiment lasted for 30 minutes and participants were thanked for their cooperation and

Running head: MUSICAL DISTRACTION ON COGNITIVE

participation. Upon completing the experiment, researchers formed graphs and charts to analyze the results. Lastly, discussion was organized to communicate the results of experiment. Researchers then examined the limitations and improvements of the research study. Design Researchers used experimental design in the research. The purpose of the research is to investigate whether the presence of background music affects the cognitive performance. Results The sum of the score for each experiment is divided into the number of participants involved in order to get the mean score of the experiments. The experiment 1 shows a mean score of 23.5 and experiment 2 shows a mean score of 22.2. There is a difference mean score between the experiment 1 and experiment 2 of 1.3. To compare the statistical dispersion of the data, the variance of experiment 1 and experiment 2 is 1.49 and 7.73 respectively. There is a small difference in mean score between the two experiments. To test the hypothesis, we can relate that the presence of background music slightly lower the attention of participants while carrying out a cognitive task. Therefore, the hypothesis is accepted. Discussion According to Bradley and Furnham (1997), there is a significant effect of pop music on both extroverts and introverts while carrying out cognitive task. Extroverts and introverts in this study had shown the effects of music on the task carried out although it shows a larger impact on introverts relatively.

Running head: MUSICAL DISTRACTION ON COGNITIVE Based on Burack (1994), the human mind has a finite capacity and is faced with

enormous amount of information in different environments. So it tends to filter out the old information and accept the new information, this is what we called selective attention. Therefore, we claimed that music can affect a person attention while doing cognitive task as the person is prone to listen to the pop music instead of concentrating on the task such as reading. Even though the finding of this study shows that the hypothesis is accepted, there are several limitations to this research. Researchers did not show the significance of the mean score difference so the result is not valid and reliable. Thus, a t-test design should be used in this research to further clarify the significance of the result by the future researchers. Besides, the duration for the participants to answer the questions was too sufficient therefore it affects the reliability of the research. For the future researchers, the duration for the answering session should be shorten and also to focus on the level of distraction as well. For example, the volume of speaker or the genre of the songs that is being used.

Running head: MUSICAL DISTRACTION ON COGNITIVE References

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Burack, J. A. (1994) Selective attention deficits in persons with autism: Preliminary evidence of an inefficient attentional lens. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 103(3), 535-543 Cosman, J., & Vecera, S. (2012). Object-based attention overrides perceptual load to modulate visual distraction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38(3), 576-579. Darowski, E., Helder, E., Zacks, R., & Hasher, L. (2008). Age-related differences in cognition: The role of distraction control. Neuropsychology, 22(5), 638-644. Michelon, P. (2006). What is a cognitive ability? Retrieved from http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2006/12/18/what-are-cognitive-abilities/ Murphy, D., Craik, F., & Li, K., & Schneider, B. (2000). Comparing the effects of aging and background noise on short-term memory performance. Psychology and Aging, 15(2), 323-334. Phillips, N., & Lesperance, D. (2003). Breaking the waves: Age differences in electrical brain activity when reading text with distractors. Psychology and Aging, 18(1), 126-139. Schoenals, K. (2004). Myth vs. truth: Led zeppelin validated. Better Nutrition, 21, 35. Tze, M. C. (2010). Attention drainage effects: How the background music effects concentration in Taiwanese college students. Journals of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 10(1), 36-46

Running head: MUSICAL DISTRACTION ON COGNITIVE

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Unsworth, N., & McMillan, B. (2012).Everyday attention failures: An individual differences investigation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38(6), 1765-1772.

Running head: MUSICAL DISTRACTION ON COGNITIVE Appendix COGNITIVE RESEARCH STUDENT ID: GENDER: AGE: TASK 1 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8) 9) 10) 11) 12) 13) 14) 15) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N 16) 17) 18) 19) 20) 21) 22) 23) 24) 25) Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y N N N N N N N N N N

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Running head: MUSICAL DISTRACTION ON COGNITIVE TASK2

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