Does background music change the brain’s response during reading?

Details

The effects of background speech and noise on visual cognitive tasks have been widely studied, but less is known about brain activity during these tasks when the background sound is music, which can evoke emotions.

Researchers used event-related potentials to examine how background music affects neural responses during reading comprehension and whether musical arousal modifies those responses. Thirty-nine postgraduate students judged whether sentences about world knowledge were correct, either in silence or with high- or low-arousal background music. Participants reported their arousal levels during the experiment.

The N400 effect, elicited by violations of world knowledge compared with correct control sentences, was significantly smaller in silence than with either type of music. There was no significant difference between the high- and low-arousal music conditions. The researchers suggested that this lack of difference might reflect the fact that the music did not affect participants’ arousal levels throughout the experiment.

The findings suggest that background music affects neural responses during reading comprehension by increasing the difficulty of semantic integration. They extend the irrelevant sound effect to suggest that music can also affect neural processing during visually based cognitive tasks.