Music can impact college students’ cognitive retention in a positive or negative way depending on the type of music they listen to and the times it is being played

Listening to music while studying has the potential to either enhance or hinder students’ cognitive retention. A well-known phenomenon that is occurring, especially on college campuses, is students “plugging in” their earphones to “plug out” the rest of the world in order to focus on studying. In light of this occurrence, researchers are trying to conclude which types of music is either enhancing or hindering students cognitive retention. Preferable genres of music being played, at an appropriate time, by the listeners positively enhances their cognitive performance. On the other hand, distracting and unwanted music/sounds being heard by the student leads to a negative correlation with the listeners’ studies. 

Because this phenomenon is recently recognized, most of the field study conducted in this area is uncertain and does not apply to all students. Researchers have not been able to specifically determine the most positive and proper way for students to study. It is difficult for researchers to come to a firm conclusion because of the wide variety of personality and retention traits that each student has to offer. However, there are enough studies produced by researchers in the Neuroscience, Psychology, and Music Psychology departments to conclude the positive and negative effects of students listening to different genres of music while studying.

Music impacts the brain on an emotional level, which influences the mood towards studying and retention for students 

Music impacts many parts of the human brain including the Auditory Cortex-the first stage of listening to sounds-and the Nucleus Accumbens- the emotional reaction to music. 

Studies suggest that listening to pleasurable or preferred music by a student will increase the positive arousal and attitude of studying. This will place the student in an emotionally less stressful environment. Listening to positive music will also motivate the student to stay alert while studying.  

 
Ms.Alison Robery, graduate student in the Cognitive and Neural Systems Area of the Psychology Department at the University of Maryland, states her opinion on why students are more motivated to listen to their own choice in music rather than the recommended classical music, such as Mozart.  

 

Like Ms. Robery previously stated in the video interview, researchers have concluded that when you hear something you like, whether that is rock n’ roll, jazz, country, Christian, pop music or Mozart’s classical tunes, it heightens your arousal and mood. This positive arousal ultimately improves coursework performance. For a short period of time, researchers believe that the upbeat, age-appropriate music of the student’s choice can improve the listeners’ arousal level and mood, which also expands and ignites creativity within a person while studying.  

Overall, it is important to understand that listening to positive up beat music such as pop, Christian, and indie genres create positive cognitive retention that will positively boost your mood before sitting down to study. This attitude enhancement will leave a positive correlation with your studies, rather than listening to unwanted disturbing or no music at all. Researchers argue that listening to preferred types of music would boost mood and confidence, which in turn encourage positive attitudes and preform better on non-musical tasks.

However, further research on this topic concludes that students listening to lyrical music while studying may leave a negative correlation with test scores

 Researchers argue that listening to music, especially fast paced and lyrical music, while studying undermines pro activity for students.  It has been studied in many cases that lyrical music is the worst type of music to listen to when studying new material. Fast paced music, such as pop, tends to cause a distraction for students. Studying with lyrical music decreases the performance level for remembering definitions and factual information. Ms. Robery exemplifies this research to be true in responding to why she thinks listening to music causes a distraction for students. 

Ms. Robery illustrates the importance of where your cognitive attention should be while studying. When studying, you are absorbing new terms, facts, and overall new information to be remembered and music is serving as a huge distraction in a students cognitive retention.

 

To promote awareness of students hindering their cognitive retention by listening to lyrical music, researchers in the psychological academia department conducted a survey with college students attending the University of Phoenix. It was concluded that 63 percent of the 334 participants affirmed to listening to pop lyrical music while studying or preforming school worked tasks. The graphic shows the overall results of the percent of students who listen to different genres of music while studying for educational purposes.  

Social media creates outlets for users, especially students, to aid in their studies. Spotify, for example, allows users to create playlists of different genres of music to use personally or share with the other 50 million subscribers. Users can browse  through the application site and choose what mood, artist, and genre of music they wish to listen to before plugging in to study.The most popular mood is “focus” for those students who wish to listen to slow classical and instrumental music.

In the past, and even now, students prefer to listen to classical music while preforming their academic studies. Past generations believed in the theory of the “Mozart Effect” was linked to an increase of IQ in college students. However, through multiple case studies, it has been recognized that classical music can lead to hindering the correlation of music and memory for college students. 

Researchers have proven that listening to classical music benefits spatial-temporal intelligence, yet classical music is also seen as having a negative effect on students on an overall cognitive retention level

Spatial-temporal reasoning is the cognitive ability to picture a spatial (three-dimensional, latitudinal etc.) pattern and understand how items or pieces can fit into that space. Spatial ability is the capacity to understand and remember the spatial relations among objects. Spatial intelligence is made up of numerous sub skills, which are unified among each other and develop throughout your life. The commonly known effect that induces students to listen to classical music is the “Mozart Effect”.  

The Mozart Effect was once seen in the 1990s as being the only outlet of music students were able to use in order to gain higher intelligence. 

The Mozart Effect came peeked in popularity in the late 1990s when the New York Times, and other social outlets claimed; “researchers have determined that listening to Mozart actually makes you smarter.”  Because of this newly found research, a book published in 1997 by Don Campbell, who in fact coined the term the Mozart Effect.  This test stirred enough interest in the academic community to induce several other research teams to conduct similar experiments, with different results. As the years pass, new technology rises and scientists were able to “correct” Don Campbell’s “Mozart Effect”. The graphic suggests how the media gained interest especially for children between the years of 1994 to 2002, but lowered interest for college students towards the end of the 1990s.

Researchers have disproved the “Mozart Effect” regarding college students with SAT, ACT, and other placement exams through multiple case studies and in response turned to absolute silence to be the main element for positive performance while studying. The “Mozart Effect” is a brief enhancement of spatial-temporal abilities in college students after listening to a Mozart piano sonata (K. 448), which was thought to result in a higher IQ and higher intelligence when listing to Mozart’s pieces as a young child or while studying as a young adult. Recently, researchers from the neuroscience department argue that listening to music composed by Mozart does not have unique or special consequences for spatial abilities. Ms. Robery gives her opinion on how she thinks that even listening to classical music while studying serves as a distraction for students preforming tasks. 

 

A case study was conducted to understand the association between the personality type of the student participants and the amount of information the students can recall while listening to either classical or pop music as opposed to complete silence.  In the study there were 79 students between the ages of 16 to 18. Students studied material in silence (control group) and the other two groups were listening to either classical (to prove the Mozart Effect) or Pop (what most students prefer to listen to). In the graph you can see the change in scores according to the type of music the participants were listening too.

The study concluded that the student participants’ ability to correctly recall words was decreased more by the sound of pop music when compared to silence or classical music. Even with classical music becoming more known to the community of academia as being a reliable musical outlet for studying, this study along with others proves the “Mozart Effect” to be not creditable. Researchers are persuading students to study in silence rather than choosing their own pop, indie, country and classical music to study with. The psychological area of music and memory, however, calls out to students to listen to soft rhymes and tones in coordination of what the student listener is studying.