Effect of Music on Memory

The Effect of Music on Memory Performance

Name: Eunice Jeremi A/P Abraham

BO800234

Department of Psychology

PSY 105

Lecturer: Ms. Winnie Cheong

The Effect of Music on Memory Performance

For hundreds of years humans have been enjoying many unique genres of music. Thousands of people purchase music records and CD’s today because it is believed to make them feel well. Today, many college students listen to music while they are studying and this has made me ponder if whether students do this for pure enjoyment or do they do this to create a better learning environment. It also made me wonder if incorporating something enjoyable into our brains will help our memory or does it just distracts us from performing to our full potential.

Memory is an active system that receives information from the senses, organizes and alters it as it stores it away, and retrieves the information from the storage (Ciccarelli & Meyer, p.210). Information first enters sensory memory, which holds an exact copy of the data for a few seconds. Short-term memory is the next step, and it holds small quantities of information for a brief period longer than sensory memory. Selective attention is utilized at this time to regulate what information is transferred to short-term memory. Unimportant information is removed permanently (Coon, 1997). Memory performance can be measured by memory test, task performance, spatial task and other tasks which need to retrieve information from our memory. Few experiments have been done by researchers to find out whether if there is an effect on memory when paired with music.

In one research, it was found that music distracts our memory performance when exposed to a music situation. An experiment which was conducted by McFarland and Kennison (1988) showed this situation. In this experiment, they assume through their studies that the right hemisphere of the brain processes music. All participants were to learn a finger maze consisting of 16 in. by 32 in. board on which the path was marked out with wire. There were 10 types of choice points between the start and the goal. The participants could not see the maze and had to learn it by touch. Each participant was assigned into one of eight groups. In this experiment one group was paired with music and the other group was not. The significance of this experiment for this literature review is that they results indicated that participants require greater effort to successfully learn a task with the presence of music. The findings may have not been accurate because it was gender bias as all the participants were all male. According to their study, music does more harm than good in processing information in our brain. This is so as the participants were not able to perform their memory performance when paired with music.

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Similarly, in another experiment conducted by Furnham and Bradley (1997) on The Differential Distraction of Background Music on the Cognitive Test Performance of Introverts and Extraverts it was found that performance of participants was marginally lowered in the presence of music. In this experiment, participants were given a pre-test questionnaire to complete, which consisted of personal details, and were asked about their level of fatigue. The participants were then given the tasks to do, one at a time. The memory test, reading comprehension and treatment and control conditions were all counter balanced, so that no effect of fatigue or residual ...

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