Bonin Tanor, Smilek Daniel
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Ave. West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2016 Apr;78(3):946-59. doi: 10.3758/s13414-015-1042-y.
We evaluated whether task-irrelevant inharmonic music produces greater interference with cognitive performance than task-irrelevant harmonic music. Participants completed either an auditory (Experiment 1) or a visual (Experiment 2) version of the cognitively demanding 2-back task in which they were required to categorize each digit in a sequence of digits as either being a target (a digit also presented two positions earlier in the sequence) or a distractor (all other items). They were concurrently exposed to either task-irrelevant harmonic music (judged to be consonant), task-irrelevant inharmonic music (judged to be dissonant), or no music at all as a distraction. The main finding across both experiments was that performance on the 2-back task was worse when participants were exposed to inharmonic music than when they were exposed to harmonic music. Interestingly, performance on the 2-back task was generally the same regardless of whether harmonic music or no music was played. We suggest that inharmonic, dissonant music interferes with cognitive performance by requiring greater cognitive processing than harmonic, consonant music, and speculate about why this might be.
我们评估了与任务无关的不和谐音乐是否比与任务无关的和谐音乐对认知表现产生更大的干扰。参与者完成了认知要求较高的2-back任务的听觉版本（实验1）或视觉版本（实验2），在该任务中，他们需要将数字序列中的每个数字分类为目标（在序列中两个位置之前也出现过的数字）或干扰项（所有其他数字）。他们同时暴露于与任务无关的和谐音乐（被判定为协和音）、与任务无关的不和谐音乐（被判定为不协和音）或完全没有音乐作为干扰。两个实验的主要发现是，当参与者暴露于不和谐音乐时，2-back任务的表现比暴露于和谐音乐时更差。有趣的是，无论播放和谐音乐还是不播放音乐，2-back任务的表现通常是相同的。我们认为，不和谐音乐比和谐音乐需要更多的认知处理，从而干扰认知表现，并推测了其原因。
