Positive vibes: How music may influence your attention

Distracted driving is a major concern in day-to-day life for many people. Texting on your phone or having a conversation with a passenger may greatly impact the way you are driving. But how about the music you are listening to in the background? Could this impact your attention too? We tend to put on music in the background while doing other everyday tasks such as working, studying, cleaning, or driving. These different tasks require cognitive processes like learning, memory, or attention. Recent interest has been raised on the effect of background music on these cognitive processes. Background music changes our internal mood and arousal levels and can influence other brain processes. Here, mood is defined by a positive or negative emotion; for example, does this music make me feel happy or sad? The arousal level is defined by the energy level of activation; for example, does this music make me feel energetic or tired?

One of the cognitive processes that may be affected by background music is called “visual attention”. It refers to the brain operations that allow us to select relevant information and filter out irrelevant ones from the same visual scene. For example, in the famous book “Where’s Waldo”, the visual scene is filled with illustrations consisting of many characters, activities, and objects. Finding Waldo requires the use of visual attention by focusing on specific identity clues such as a red-and-white-striped shirt, bobble hat and glasses.

Finding Waldo in this visual scene requires the use of visual attention. Try playing background music and see if it helps you find Waldo faster.

A research team led by Dr. Jessica Grahn, PhD here at Western University, looked at the effect of background music on visual attention. To evaluate this effect, PhD candidate Angela Marti-Marca and Dr. Grahn used two tasks: a music rating task and an attention task. The rating task consisted of listening to different music excerpts and rating them on a mood scale and an arousal scale to classify each music into one of these four categories: high arousal positive, high arousal negative, low arousal positive or low arousal negative. The second task was used to measure visual attention which consisted of visual cues and shapes and asked participants to determine if they are matching or not. Background music, selected from the first rating task and for each of the four categories, was played simultaneously during performance of the attention task by the participants.

When high arousal positive music was played during the attention task (for example, happy and thrilling music such as “Enchanted Suite” from Alan Menken), it improved participants’ performance on the attention task, while playing high arousal negative music (for example, distressing and angry music such as “Worlds Collide” from Apocalyptica) made their performance worse (i.e., slower responses). Overall, this study showed that mood modifies the effect of high arousal music and, in particular, that high arousal positive music may reduce the time to respond to the task. These important findings show that background music may impact our everyday tasks, by example, picking the right music to help you study effectively or be more alert on the road when you are driving.

Since this study was performed in students aged 18 to 30 years old, it would be interesting to conduct a similar study in a wider range of ages to see if the same impact is observed in children or elderly persons as well as in a different population to see whether there are any socio-cultural differences.  The biggest takeaway from this study is that playing positive music can influence how you perform the task at hand. So let’s play some positive music and smile!