The ability to short-term memorise and process information is a critical skill for all people, particularly for students, who are more likely than others to need to work with information in a learning context. Often, in order to learn new topics on their own or to remember critical theoretical concepts, students resort to the usage of background music. It is done to set the mood in a necessary and comfortable atmosphere. Nevertheless, there is a need to study the impact of the chosen studying background music on the ability to learn and recall. The importance of researching this area is based on the desire to investigate deep patterns of short-term memory and to identify its predictors. This literature review proposes to investigate existing findings and conclusions in primary sources, identify potential problems and outline a final research question.
The first independent variable of the research design is the choice of a particular type of music, be it classical background tunes or rock. For this variable, it is paramount to understand the potential differences between the two chosen genres of background music: the tempos, moods, presence of lyrics and majorities are different for them. Each genre has its own fans, and there are also students who have no sympathy or even antipathy for a particular genre. A study by Hu, Li and Kong (2019) assessed exactly how background music of different tonalities affects graduate students’ ability to remember information for learning more effectively, including measurements of participants’ physiological traits. It was shown that the choice of music did not significantly affect the learning performance of the sample. That is, it did not lead to differences between groups; however, it was reported that differences were observed in electrodermal activity (EDA) scores for students depending on the type of music preferred. The largest changes in EDA were true for students who listened to music they did not like (Hu et al., 2019). The choice of background music for memorisation should be done to the individual’s preference, as when there is a mismatch of interests, additional reactions are observed in the body. This circumstance may detract from the focus on learning the material. Increased EDA may be evidence of additional emotional reactions to unpleasant music to listen to, irritability and loss of attention, which are critical for effective learning. It follows that when examining the effects of background music, the student’s personality traits, which determine memorisation abilities, cannot be ignored.
Among these personality traits, extraversion, as a character trait that manifests itself in openness, friendliness and a desire for active communication, should be particularly highlighted. Lehmann, Hamm and Seufert (2019) studied how extraversion and background music as two independent variables affect cognitive learning abilities. Among the main findings of these authors is the fact that background music was a significant predictor for the change in recall when extraversion was low in students, but when extraversion was high, the trend was reversed. It can be observed that this result contradicts the results of Hu et al. (2019), but such contradiction should be perceived as a potential difference in designs. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that background music can have an ambiguous effect on recollection and information-processing outcomes. This non-uniformity is due to the individual’s personality traits. In the context of background music as a predictor, it is also worth considering its homogeneity, that is, listening to the same music for the entire duration of information learning.
Background music can have an unclear effect on recollection ability, depending on whether it is repeated or not. Research by Echaide, Del Río and Pacios (2019) tested whether improvements in information recall are possible with different background music patterns. In particular, it was found that no significant changes in memorisation were shown depending on whether music was included or not. On the other hand, a repeated pattern of the same music was shown to affect short-term memory negatively. In other words, if a student listens to the same music throughout the learning process, the tendency to remember and process information is negatively affected. Moreover, impairments were observed to be more intense for spatiotemporal memory than for verbal memory (Echaide et al., 2019). In addition to the type of background music, congruence was also a current design variable.
The second variable of interest in the research question was congruence, which should be understood as the proportionality or appropriateness of the elements to each other. Such approaches in education respond to a design in which students are offered relevant knowledge that can be accommodated within a coherent framework. In contrast, non-congruent approaches produce inconsistent, incongruent elements. Research shows that congruent approaches play a more significant role in the absorption of new information, as they yield more positive learning outcomes than non-congruent design suggestions (Ahrens and Gong, 2021). It follows that congruent techniques should be used to facilitate learning and to remember new information more effectively. When it became clear that background music has no universal influence on learning and congruent techniques prove to be more beneficial, it is of interest to examine the interaction between the variables.
The interaction between the type of background music and its congruence during the encoding and recall of numerical information shows some ambiguity. Cournoyer Lemaire (2019) reported that this ambiguity is primarily due to different designs of experiments that show that background music can be, in some cases, useful for remembering and, in other cases, harmful. Cournoyer Lemaire (2019) conducted an experiment on the effect of background music congruence on information recall. The researcher found that stimulating music had more benefit for learning than relaxing music, but such differences were not significant. Another study shows that the presence of congruent background music can cause complications in neural information processing compared to silence during learning (Du et al., 2020). Different, but not inconsistent, results were found in a study showing that memory effects were higher for the congruent design than for the non-congruent design (Talamini et al., 2022). Based on this evidence, it can be concluded that academic discourse does not appear to agree on exactly how music combined with congruence affects information recall effects. This leads to the conclusion that there is a need to contribute to the academic literature through experimentation.
The observed gap in the literature due to the lack of universal findings motivates the need to investigate the relationship between the variables further. The type of background music and congruence design as independent variables should be researched in the context of the effect on short-term recall ability. The final research question can be formulated as an evaluation of the effect of classical and rock music used in congruent and incongruent designs on short-term memory ability. Three research hypotheses will be used for further analysis. First, students listening to classical music as a background tune will tend to give correct answers more often. Secondly, a congruent experimental design will show more positive recall results than a non-congruent design. Finally, the congruent design of classical music as a background melody will show maximum results compared to the other three combinations of independent variables.
Reference List
Ahrens, K. and Gong, S.P. (2021) ‘Contextual congruency and novel metaphor integration’, Cognitive Linguistic Studies, 8(1), pp. 109-132.
Cournoyer Lemaire, E. (2019) ‘The effect of background music on episodic memory’, Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, 29(1), pp. 22-35.
Du, M., et al. (2020) ‘The effects of background music on neural responses during reading comprehension’, Scientific Reports, 10, pp. 1-10.
Echaide, C., Del Río, D. and Pacios, J. (2019) The differential effect of background music on memory for verbal and visuospatial information. The Journal of General Psychology, 146(4), pp. 443-458.
Hu, X., Li, F. and Kong, R. (2019) ‘Can background music facilitate learning? Preliminary results on reading comprehension’, 9th International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge Proceedings. ASU, Arizona, US. ACM, pp. 101-105.
Lehmann, J.A.M., Hamm, V. and Seufert, T. (2019) ‘The influence of background music on learners with varying extraversion: seductive detail or beneficial effect’, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 33(1), pp. 85-94.
Talamini, F., et al. (2022) ‘Musical emotions affect memory for emotional pictures’, Scientific Reports, 12(1), pp. 1-8.