Impact of Listening to Music on Cognitive Performance

The article that we have chosen to review is, the impact of listening to music on cognitive performance. This article was written by, Arielle S. Dolegui in the year of 2013. Arielle S. Dolegui graduated in 2013 with a concentration in Psychology/Biopsychology from University of Maryland, Baltimore County in Catonsville, MD. [ n.d (2013). Articles by Arielle S. Dolegui.: http://www.studentpulse.com/authors/1428/arielle-s-dolegui, August 14, 2014]. Arielle Dolegui is business and research analyst in Bio Health Innovation (BHI) Organization. She joined BHI in the year of 2013. She is responsible for supporting the Director of Innovation Programs and performs research related to healthcare systems, diseases, information technology and other business information. Arielle has extensive experience in the pharmaceutical, biomedical and non-for-profit industries. She is very involved in her community and is currently engaged in fundraising activities for the National Association of Mental Illness (NAMI), as well as the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. [n.d staff: http://www.biohealthinnovation.org/index.php/about-us/our-staff/45-staff,  August 14, 2014]. In this research article she have discussed about how music effects the cognitive performance of students.

In order to ease the worries while studying for test or doing assignments or homework, a lot of students tend to listen to music. It is a usual implementation that turns out to be very favourable for college students to realize the part played by music in their cognitive performance (Arielle, 2013). Research have been carried out to identify the impact of music in cognitive performance. Based on a research conducted by (Cockerton, Moore, and Norman, 1997), Arielle found out that, music plays an important role in enhancing the cognitive performance. It is significant to perceive, on how variety kind of music influence the cognitive performance of students. As stated by Arielle in 2013 by referring to (Furnham and Bradley, 1997), there are also research that results, music has been found as distracting element for students in completing a task.

Personality type is one of the factor which effect the cognitive performance when listening to music (Furnham & Bradley, 1997). The type of personality that Furnham and Bardley are referring to is introvert and extravert. Introvert person is a person who are shy and inclined to be silent in speech, whereas, extravert person is an outgoing and socially confident person. To study the effect of music on cognitive performance toward music. They conducted a research which involves an immediate recall on memory test, and also a delayed recall and a reading comprehension test. They choose introvert person and extravert person to be the participants of the search.

 The participants who are involved should complete both the tasks in two different situation, where one is with pop music condition and another in silence. For the immediate recall on memory test in pop music condition, both the introverts and extraverts performed badly. Extraverts performed well compared to introverts on the second task which is delayed recall and reading comprehension test in pop music condition. When both the cognitive tasks were done in silence, introverts did well compared to extraverts. Therefore, Furnham and Bradley concluded that pop music is a distractor for both the introverts and extraverts but background noise other than pop music could improve the performance of cognitive task in extraverts, but it will impair the introverts performance.