Effect of Music Preference on Complex Task Performance

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between music preference and extraversion on complex task performance in a sample of 34 college students from a small, Christian, liberal arts university. Separated into two groups of high and low extraversion, these 34 participants were invited to participate in the experimental phase of the study. For the experimental phase, each participant experienced three different music conditions (Preferred, Preset, and Silence) while performing a complex reading comprehension task. The results revealed a significant interaction effect between level of extraversion and music condition. Individuals with higher levels of extraversion performed marginally significantly better listening to preferred music during the complex task compared to silence and a preset music selection; all other sound conditions were not significant. The Effect of Music Preference on Complex Task Performance Music, like all other art forms, is unique to human beings. It expresses emotion shared by all cultures, closes the gap between eras of time, and reflects attitudes and progression. The power of music holds a strong influence over many human functions and recent technological advances of the 20 th and 21 st centuries have made music highly accessible. In addition, the ubiquitous nature of music accessibility in modern society raises important questions about the pervasive presence of music in work and educational settings. Studies searching for the distracting or facilitating effect of music on task performance have generally been inconsistent. Despite inconclusive results, public acceptance of claims that support the facilitative function of music in task performance is common. The highly publicized study by Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky conducted in 1994 for example, found significant results "proving" Mozart music increased spatial reasoning performance in college students. McKelvie & Low (2002) conducted a

Effects of Auditory Simulation and Personality Types on Working Memory

“…Likewise, the extraversion and introversion factor didn't have any significant difference in performance quality irrespective of the presence or absence of auditory simulations. This was again unlike previous findings (Furnham & Bradley, 1997;McDonald, 2013;Furnham &Strbac, 2002). Although, if the means of the performance between introverts and extraverts in the presence of auditory simulation is compared, extraverts did slightly better than introverts.…”

“…The reliability variable is ranging from .85 to .90 for extraversion (Weaver & Kiewitz, 2006), for this study we would only be using the extraversion aspect of this personality questionnaire. This tool will help determine the factor of extraversion and introversion which seems to be a contributing factor in many studies dealing with this topic (Furnham & Strbac, 2002;McDonald, 2013;Gold et al, 2013;Nadler, 2010). For the prose retention task, 5 short prose passages taken from TOEFL sample questions (http://www.ets.org/toefl) consisting of different topics were selected and administered to a random sample of people who rated them on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being very easy, 5 being extremely hard).…”

The Mozart Effect on the Episodic Memory of Healthy Adults Is Null, but Low-Functioning Older Adults May Be an Exception

“…Another pattern that can be found in the literature concerns the moderating role of musical preference -the extent to which listeners enjoy the music style that is used as background or prime -in boosting the positive effects of music. Preference does not seem to change the Irrelevant Sound Effect (Perham and Vizard, 2011), but -at least in younger adults -it boosts the positive effects of background music on reading comprehension (Mcdonald, 2013), as well as those of musical primes on image encoding (Carr and Rickard, 2016): in both cases, preferred music outperforms silence, while non-preferred music does not. One explanation for the advantage of preferred music is that it is rewarding (Blood and Zatorre, 2001;Ferreri and Verga, 2016), and reward may be one mechanism subtending the positive effects of music on cognition (Ferreri and Verga, 2016).…”

“…Based on the idea that non-task-concurrent music (prime) could keep the benefits of background music (arousal, reward or mood improvement) while minimizing its distraction-related costs, we predicted that music would have strong advantage over silence and/or environmental sounds. Concerning preference, we predicted an advantage of preferred over non-preferred music, based on previous findings (Mcdonald, 2013;Carr and Rickard, 2016) as well as on the principle that preference could maximize the reward component of music.…”

The effects of background music on English reading comprehension for English foreign language learners: evidence from an eye movement study

“…Recently, McDonald (2013) investigated the link between preferred music genre and extroversion on reading performance. The result of his study showed that music could facilitate reading performance if the music which was listened to was what they preferred.…”