The gender difference in distraction of background music and noise on the cognitive task performance

Abstract

The current study examined the effect of background music and noise on the cognitive task performance and tested the gender difference. Ninety-one participants completed (53 female, 38 male) two kinds of cognitive tasks: one was simple task (perception task), the other was complex task (spatial reasoning task, which had two levels: easy & difficult). Participants were randomly assigned to one of five background sound conditions: country music, jazz music, rock music, traffic noise, and silence. We used both latency and error rate as cognitive performance. A three-way significant interaction among background sound, cognitive task and gender was found. The differential distraction of background sound was significant on performance of perception and spatial reasoning tasks. Participants spent more time completing the cognitive tasks when in the presence of rock, and made more mistakes when in the presence of noise. This distraction pattern was only found in male participants; Female participants were not distracted by background sound. The implication of these findings was discussed.