Music listening while you learn: no influence of background music on verbal learning
Jäncke L, Sandmann P
Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 33 citations
How it was studied
- Design
- Randomized controlled trial (indexed by PubMed)
- Studied in
- People
- Main outcome
- Health markers and function
Who paid for it
- Funding
- Independent funding
Based on full-text disclosure statement.
Publication
- Published
- 2010-01-01 · Behav Brain Funct · vol. 6 · issue 1 · p. 3
- Publisher
- BioMed Central
- Cited
- 114 citations · more than 92% of similar papers · 3.5× the field average
- Impact
- Top 10% most cited in its field
- References
- 107 works
- Access
- Open access (journal) · CC-BY
- Research areas
- Neuroscience and Music Perception · Music Therapy and Health · Diverse Music Education Insights
- Keywords
- Active listening, Psychology, Cognitive psychology, Verbal learning, Stimulus (psychology), Electroencephalography, Event-related potential, Audiology, Cognition, Communication, Neuroscience, Medicine
- MeSH
- humans, electroencephalography, acoustic stimulation, pilot projects, verbal learning, auditory perception, psychomotor performance, educational measurement, music, adult, female, male, young adult
2 authors
From CH
- Lutz Jäncke · correspondingUniversity of Zurich
- Pascale SandmannUniversity of Zurich
Abstract
Background
Whether listening to background music enhances verbal learning performance is still disputed. In this study we investigated the influence of listening to background music on verbal learning performance and the associated brain activations.
Methods
Musical excerpts were composed for this study to ensure that they were unknown to the subjects and designed to vary in tempo (fast vs. slow) and consonance (in-tune vs. out-of-tune). Noise was used as control stimulus. 75 subjects were randomly assigned to one of five groups and learned the presented verbal material (non-words with and without semantic connotation) with and without background music. Each group was exposed to one of five different background stimuli (in-tune fast, in-tune slow, out-of-tune fast, out-of-tune slow, and noise). As dependent variable, the number of learned words was used. In addition, event-related desynchronization (ERD) and event-related synchronization (ERS) of the EEG alpha-band were calculated as a measure for cortical activation.
Results
We did not find any substantial and consistent influence of background music on verbal learning. There was neither an enhancement nor a decrease in verbal learning performance during the background stimulation conditions. We found however a stronger event-related desynchronization around 800 - 1200 ms after word presentation for the group exposed to in-tune fast music while they learned the verbal material. There was also a stronger event-related synchronization for the group exposed to out-of-tune fast music around 1600 - 2000 ms after word presentation.
Conclusion
Verbal learning during the exposure to different background music varying in tempo and consonance did not influence learning of verbal material. There was neither an enhancing nor a detrimental effect on verbal learning performance. The EEG data suggest that the different acoustic background conditions evoke different cortical activations. The reason for these different cortical activations is unclear. The most plausible reason is that when background music draws more attention verbal learning performance is kept constant by the recruitment of compensatory mechanisms.
Abstract via Europe PMC. Copyright remains with the authors or publisher (CC BY).
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