An experiment investigating the effect of background music on students ability to recall a list of words

International Baccalaureate Psychology

An experiment investigating the effect of background music on students’ ability to recall a list of words

Name: Kayla

Candidate No.: 0003562026

Type of Study: Experiment

Subject and Level: Psychology Standard Level

Date of submission: June 1, 2011

Word Count: 1, 498 words

Table of Contents

Abstract 3

Introduction 4

Method 6

Design 6

Participants 7

Materials 7

Procedure 8

Results 8

Discussion 10

References 12

Appendices 13

Appendix i 13

Appendix ii 14

Appendix iii 15

Appendix iv 17

Abstract

This experiment aims at investigate the effect of background music has on students’ ability to recall words from a list, based on St Clair’s (2000) and Thompson & Tulving’s (1970) research. The music selected was One Republics “Come Home” as it fits the genre of easy listening, nonpercussive in beat. The measured variable of this experiment being the number of correctly recalled words. Using opportunity sampling, all participants were aged between 14 to 18 years of age and are currently attending a Queensland Academy. Two groups of 10 participants were used in this experiment fitting the independent measures’ design, one of which is the control (with no music); and the other with music being played at both recall and memorization. The participants were given one minute to study a list of 15 words before they were removed and the participants asked to recall as many words as they could remember on a sheet of paper. The results showed that with the presence of music at both memorization and recall, the number of words recalled increased on average by 3.3 words out of 15. This demonstrates that exposure to music during both memorisation and recall of information will increase an individual’s recall.

Introduction

Memory is an important process studied in the cognitive level of analysis of psychology and there are certain factors which influence memory recall. This includes environmental factors such as background music. St. Clair (2000), proposed that due to the encoding specificity principle of memory, the most effective retrieval cues that help with recall are the sensory cues which were present at the time of memorisation (Thompson & Tulving, 1970). It was proposed that the presence of easy listening background music would have a positive influence on memory recall, as the auditory cue presented by the piece of music would stimulate the recall of information that was memorized when the auditory cue was present.

St. Clair’s experiment aimed to determine if studying with music affected the participant’s performance on a test. A hundred and twenty participants of mixed gender and age from Missouri Western State College were asked to study a list of 15 words for two minutes, before recalling them. The participants were separated into four groups, one of which was exposed to music during both the memorization and the recall periods; one had music playing during the studying period; the third group had music during the recall period and the final group were not presented with any music. The results from this experiment showed that there was no large difference between the experimental groups and the control. Despite this St. Clair states that although the results from the test were not significant, the findings were consistent with the idea that music can be beneficial in memory recall.

By undertaking this experiment with the use of another song tests the concept of different auditory stimuli positively affecting memory recall. Thus it will be plausible to determine whether or not there are benefits to listening to music whilst studying. This experiment’s aim is to investigate the effects of the presence of easy listening background music on memory recall of students from a Queensland Academy.