Individual Differences in Working Memory Predict the Effect of Music on Student Performance

Past research has demonstrated that music often negatively impacts performance on a variety of cognitive tasks, including academically relevant tasks. There are, however, discrepancies in the literature, including a handful of instances where no effect of music was observed. We tested the novel hypothesis that working-memory capacity moderated the detrimental effect of music on academic performance. Undergraduate students worked on reading comprehension and math tasks under both music and silence conditions before completing a battery of working memory capacity assessments. Although music led to a significant decline in performance overall, working-memory capacity moderated this effect in the reading-comprehension tasks. These findings suggest that individuals who are better able to control their attention (as indexed by working-memory capacity) may be protected from music-related distraction when completing certain kinds of academically relevant tasks. Instructors of undergraduate psychology courses often inform their students of a finding that studying while listening to music hinders'learning. Thus, the advice students often receive is that they ought not to attempt any sort of academic work while listening to music. Many students, however, profess a distrust of such a finding, and retain a belief that they in fact do better with music, despite evidence to the contrary. An important question then is whether the detrimental effect that music has on learning actually impacts everyone in the same way. The present study examined whether individual differences in people's attention and memory abilities could predict the degree to which music impeded their performance of academic tasks. Interestingly, the higher an individual scored on the tasks measuring attention and memory abilities, the less they were affected by music while they worked on reading-comprehension questions. However, when solving math problems, the detrimental effect of music was similar, regardless of how individuals scored on the tasks measuring memory and attention.