This project investigated how the presence and genre of background music influence short-term visual recall. With 24 participants divided equally among three conditions: instrumental music, lyrical music, and no music. The experiment had each participant view 16 images for 30 seconds across four rounds, followed by immediate recall.
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Design: Participants were exposed to one of three musical conditions while memorizing images.
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Data Analysis: Assumptions were checked using box plots, Shapiro-Wilk, and Levene’s tests. Although normality was confirmed, the equal variance assumption was violated. Despite this, a one-way ANOVA was conducted followed by Tukey’s test for pairwise comparisons.
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The analysis failed to reject the null hypothesis, indicating no statistically significant difference in recall performance between the three conditions.
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Visualizations and summary statistics showed similar recall performance across the groups.
These findings suggest that, within the limitations of this study, the presence or genre of background music does not significantly affect short-term memory recall. The study offers insights for future research into cognitive performance and studying strategies, highlighting areas such as sample size, repetition of trials, and the diversity of musical genres for further exploration.
This project contributes to the ongoing discussion on the effects of music on cognitive tasks, providing a data-driven perspective on a topic with mixed findings in existing literature.