Effects of Background Music on Phonological Short-Term Memory

Abstract

Immediate memory for visually presented verbal material is disrupted by concurrent speech, even when the speech is unattended and in a foreign language. Unattended noise does not produce a reliable decrement. These results have been interpreted in terms of a phonological short-term store that excludes non-speechlike sounds. The characteristics of this exclusion process were explored by studying the effects of music on the serial recall of sequences of nine digits presented visually. Experiment 1 compared the effects of unattended vocal or instrumental music with quiet and showed that both types of music disrupted STM performance, with vocal music being more disruptive than instrumental music. Experiment 2 attempted to replicate this result using more highly trained subjects. Vocal music caused significantly more disruption than instrumental music, which was not significantly worse than the silent control condition. Experiment 3 compared instrumental music with unattended speech and with noise modulated in amplitude, the degree of modulation being the same as in speech. The results showed that the noise condition did not differ from silence; both of these proved less disruptive than instrumental music, which was in turn less disruptive than the unattended speech condition. Theoretical interpretation of these results and their potential practical implications for the disruption of cognitive performance by background music are discussed.

Dynamics of brain activity underlying working memory for music in a naturalistic condition

“…Deutsch (1970) observed a dissociation between tones and phonemes in a WM task with tones, where tones impaired performance to a greater extent than phonemes. Results obtained by Salamé & Baddeley (1989) using a verbal WM task that was interfered by instrumental and vocal music indicated a similar dissociation, namely, that vocal music interfered more with the task than instrumental music. Findings were interpreted by the authors in terms of a phonological store that excluded non speech-like sounds.…”

“…Preliminary findings in research on auditory WM show differences between linguistic and musical memory (Deutsch, 1970;Salamé & Baddeley, 1989), leading to the speculation of specific networks encoding memory for music. However, the finding that musical training enhances the performance during verbal tasks (Chan, Ho, & Cheung, 1998) reveals rather overlapping structures for verbal and tonal WM.…”

The irrelevant sound effect in short-term memory: Is there developmental change?

“…The mechanisms underlying this disruption are not clearly specified. Originally, it was assumed that irrelevant sounds partially mask memory traces within the phonological store (Salamé & Baddeley, 1982, 1989. This view was later abandoned, as it is not in line with major characteristics of the ISE, such as its evocation by nonspeech sounds (Elliott, 2002;Jones & Macken, 1993), the impact of the sounds' changing state, and the finding that the ISE with speech is unaffected by the phonological similarity between the irrelevant speech and the memory items (Jones & Macken, 1995;Larsen, Baddeley, & Andrade, 2000).…”

The irrelevant speech effect: a PET study

“…This effect occurs despite the fact that the irrelevant speech is independent of the serial recall task and despite the fact that subjects are explicitly instructed to ignore the speech (Jones, 1993). The effect also occurs regardless of whether the items to be memorized are presented visually (Salame & Baddeley, 1982) or auditorily (Hanley & Broadbent, 1987), regardless of whether the irrelevant speech occurs at presentation or during the retention interval (Miles, Jones, & Madden, 1991), whether it comprises meaningful or meaningless information (Colle & Welsh, 1976;Jones, Miles, & Page, 1990;LeCompte, 1994;Salame & Baddeley, 1989) or even if the irrelevant speech is being played backwards . However, the effect appears not to be a simple distraction, since loud bursts of noise have little or no effect on the serial recall task (Colle, 1980;Salame & Baddeley, 1987).…”