Giroux Sara-Valérie, Caparos Serge, Gosselin Nathalie, Rutembesa Eugène, Blanchette Isabelle
Groupe de Recherche CogNAC, Département de Psychologie, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Trois-Rivières, Québec, QC, Canada.
DysCo Laboratory, Département de Psychologie, Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France.
Front Psychol. 2020 Apr 28;11:774. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00774. eCollection 2020.
Previous research shows that listening to pleasant, stimulating and familiar music is likely to improve working memory performance. The benefits of music on cognition have been widely studied in Western populations, but not in other cultures. The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of music on working memory in a non-Western sociocultural context: Rwanda. One hundred and nineteen participants were randomly assigned to a control group (short story) or one of four different musical conditions varying on two dimensions: arousal (relaxing, stimulating) and cultural origin (Western, Rwandan). Working memory was measured using a behavioral task, the n-back paradigm, before and after listening to music (or the short story in the control condition). Unlike in previous studies with Western samples, our results with this Rwandan sample did not show any positive effect of familiar, pleasant and stimulating music on working memory. Performance on the n-back task generally improved from pre to post, in all conditions, but this improvement was less important in participants who listened to familiar Rwandan music compared to those who listened to unfamiliar Western music or to a short story. The study highlights the importance of considering the sociocultural context in research examining the impact of music on cognition. Although different aspects of music are considered universal, there may be cultural differences that limit the generalization of certain effects of music on cognition or that modulate the characteristics that favor its beneficial impact.
先前的研究表明，聆听愉悦、振奋且熟悉的音乐可能会提高工作记忆表现。音乐对认知的益处已在西方人群中得到广泛研究，但在其他文化中却未得到充分研究。本研究的目的是在非西方社会文化背景下——卢旺达，探讨音乐对工作记忆的影响。119名参与者被随机分配到一个对照组（短篇故事）或四种不同音乐条件中的一种，这四种音乐条件在两个维度上有所不同：唤醒度（放松的、振奋的）和文化起源（西方的、卢旺达的）。在聆听音乐（或对照组的短篇故事）之前和之后，使用行为任务——n-back范式来测量工作记忆。与之前针对西方样本的研究不同，我们对卢旺达样本的研究结果并未显示出熟悉、愉悦且振奋的音乐对工作记忆有任何积极影响。在所有条件下，n-back任务的表现从预测试到后测试总体上都有所提高，但与聆听不熟悉的西方音乐或短篇故事的参与者相比，聆听熟悉的卢旺达音乐的参与者的这种提高幅度较小。该研究强调了在研究音乐对认知的影响时考虑社会文化背景的重要性。尽管音乐的不同方面被认为具有普遍性，但可能存在文化差异，这些差异会限制音乐对认知某些影响的普遍性，或者调节有利于其有益影响的特征。
