The reverse Mozart effect: music disrupts verbal working memory irrespective of whether you like it or not

Bell, Raoul; Mieth, Laura; Röer, Jan Philipp; Buchner, Axel

doi:10.1080/20445911.2023.2216919

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…The basic procedure was identical to that of Experiment 1 with the main exception being that 8-s segments of Mozart’s sonata K. 448 (cf. 30 ) were used as the distractor material instead of the piano melodies that were used in Experiment 1. The processing-fluency account implies that the effect of the direction of the music should not depend on the specific music used.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the study of Perham and Sykora 25 , the two musical pieces that were compared differed greatly in their acoustic properties and not only, if at all, in processing fluency. In the study of Bell et al 30 , the association between liking and metacognitive judgments of distraction was only correlational; therefore, no causal conclusions could be drawn. A direct test of the competing accounts thus has yet to be performed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…As a result, the grindcore metal song objectively caused less distraction than the dance track, but global retrospective metacognitive judgments of distraction did not differ between these two types of sounds. Bell et al 30 found that participants who indicated that they liked Mozart’s sonata K. 448 more than other participants gave less negative global retrospective metacognitive judgments about the distracting effects of the music on their performance when in fact the objective sound effect was unrelated to liking. These findings suggest that people do not have direct access to the degree to which music disrupts their serial-recall performance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evidence of a metacognitive illusion in judgments about the effects of music on cognitive performance

Bell,

Komar,

Mieth

et al. 2023

Sci Rep

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Two experiments serve to examine how people make metacognitive judgments about the effects of task-irrelevant sounds on cognitive performance. According to the direct-access account, people have direct access to the processes causing auditory distraction. According to the processing-fluency account, people rely on the feeling of processing fluency to make heuristic metacognitive judgments about the distracting effects of sounds. To manipulate the processing fluency of simple piano melodies and segments of Mozart’s sonata K. 448, the audio files of the music were either left in their original forward direction or reversed. The results favor the processing-fluency account over the direct-access account: Even though, objectively, forward and backward music had the same distracting effect on serial recall, stimulus-specific prospective metacognitive judgments showed that participants incorrectly predicted only backward music but not forward music to be distracting. The difference between forward and backward music was reduced but not eliminated in global retrospective metacognitive judgments that participants provided after having experienced the distracting effect of the music first-hand. The results thus provide evidence of a metacognitive illusion in people’s judgments about the effects of music on cognitive performance.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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