Title: Effects of Music Genre on Simple and Simulated Task Switching
Abstract: Effects of Music Genre on Simple and Simulated Task Switching Introduction Hearing or listening to music is a part of everyday life for most people in the twenty-first century, whether it is heard at the store while picking up groceries, in the car while driving to work, or as a backdrop at the gym. Music has made its way into the work environment as well, commonly being heard in hotels, restaurants, retail stores, hospitals, banks, and offices.(1) Some studies suggest that background music improves worker performance, whereas others have shown it to have a negative effect on performance.(2) Thanks to contradictory results such as these, researchers have aimed to understand which aspects of music effect performance. Yi-Nuo Shih, Rong-Hwa Huang, and Hsin-Yu Chiang studied the effects of background music with and without lyrics and found that songs with lyrics tended to distract listeners, resulting in a decrease in performance, and instrumental music without lyrics did not significantly effect performance.(3) In a similar study, Huang and Shih found that the more people either strongly liked or disliked the background music, the more their performance was negatively affected.(4) Peter Tze-Ming Chou compared the effects of hip-hop music, light classical music, and no music, finding that music of higher intensity (i.e. hip-hop) is more distracting and has a more substantial negative effect on task performance and concentration.(5) This study is aimed at better understanding how performance on simple and complex tasks is affected by the presence of background music with and without lyrics. notable model of that helps explain previous findings is Daniel Kahneman's limited capacity model.(6) In Kahneman's model, it is theorized that a person has only a limited amount of that can be deployed at any one time. This model has two precepts. First, can be distributed freely among different simultaneous tasks and is increased or decreased depending on the arousal level of each task. Second, performing multiple tasks requires the amount of required by the demand of each single task completed in seclusion, such as little being required for easy tasks, while more difficult tasks require more attention. Consequently, one may fail to perform a task because their supply of does not meet the demand. As the limited capacity theory has advanced, so have the explanations for interference. One group of theorists argues that interference occurs when the general attentional capacity is exceeded. However, other theorists argue that interference occurs when two tasks compete for the same resources of information processing and the capacity of the specific resource is exceeded a phenomenon called 'structural interference.'(7) This work focuses on general capacity interference because listening to music can be either a passive or active task, and it can require more or less depending on the amount of we allocate to listening. Due to the limited amount of one can allocate at a time, elements of background media may draw away from tasks, thus exceeding one's general capacity. Similar to the current study, Chou analyzed the level of distraction in different types of music on reading comprehension, using Kahneman's model of as the theoretical framework.(8) Chou notes that reading comprehension performance is drastically reduced in groups experiencing hip-hop music compared to light classical music or no music at all.(9) Limited capacity theory holds that capacity interference occurs when two simultaneous tasks compete for a person's general capacity of attention, hence Chou explains his results in terms of the attention drainage effect, which could be a new type of interference falling under the limited capacity theory. …
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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