Abstract
The effects of background speech or noise on visually based cognitive tasks has been widely investigated; however, little is known about how the brain works during such cognitive tasks when music, having a powerful function of evoking emotions, is used as the background sound. The present study used event-related potentials to examine the effects of background music on neural responses during reading comprehension and their modulation by musical arousal. Thirty-nine postgraduates judged the correctness of sentences about world knowledge without or with background music (high-arousal music and low-arousal music). The participants’ arousal levels were reported during the experiment. The results showed that the N400 effect, elicited by world knowledge violations versus correct controls, was significantly smaller for silence than those for high- and low-arousal music backgrounds, with no significant difference between the two musical backgrounds. This outcome might have occurred because the arousal levels of the participants were not affected by the high- and low-arousal music throughout the experiment. These findings suggest that background music affects neural responses during reading comprehension by increasing the difficulty of semantic integration, and thus extend the irrelevant sound effect to suggest that the neural processing of visually based cognitive tasks can also be affected by music.
Highlights
The aforementioned findings were drawn from behavioural investigations
Because we focused on the influences of background music and the differences associated with the N400 effect, only the significant effects related to group or sentence type are reported in the following paragraphs
The present study used ERPs to investigate the effects of background music on neural responses during reading comprehension and its modulation by musical arousal level
Summary
The aforementioned findings were drawn from behavioural investigations. To our knowledge, only one EEG study has examined the effects of the type of background music on cognitive performance, brain wave activity, and heart rate during reading comprehension[37]. One goal of the present study was to investigate how background music affects neural responses during reading comprehension using ERPs. When music and cognitive tasks are presented successively, music listening can induce a positive mood, increase arousal levels, and improve subsequent cognitive processing[40]. The goals of the present study were to examine the effects of background music on neural responses to world knowledge integration and its modulation by musical arousal, with a 3 (group: high-arousal music, low-arousal music, and silence) × 2 (sentence type: correct vs world knowledge violation) mixed design. Each sentence was presented word by word, and the last word of each correct sentence was changed to form a sentence with a world knowledge violation Fourth, both the high- and low-arousal musical excerpts used in our study were unfamiliar instrumental music expressing positive emotions to control for the influences of musical familiarity on reading comprehension. If background music is as distracting as irrelevant speech[61] or noise[17], the N400 effect for silence should be smaller than that for background music
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