Exploring the Effects of Background Music and Biological Sex on Verbal Memory

Abstract

Music is an important aspect of many people’s lives; therefore, research surrounding the impacts of background music is important and relevant. The literature on the impact of music on cognitive processes is ever-expanding and has mixed findings (Theofilidis et al., 2020). Through a quasi-experimental 2 x 3 factorial ANOVA, we studied the effect of background music on verbal memory. We hypothesized that performance on a verbal memory task would be better for females under the no music and instrumental conditions. We also hypothesized that verbal memory performance would be better for males under the lyrical condition. We had three independent music conditions: no music, instrumental, and lyrical. We used biological sex as a quasi-independent variable. We recruited a sample of N = 94 from the SONA research pool. The findings did not support our hypothesis.