Background auditory stimuli effect on memorizing tasks performance based on electroencephalography

Abstract

Listening to music/sound during study can give positive and negative influence on human cognitive processing. Thus, it has attracted researchers to conduct studies using various types of sound stimuli. Some researchers believe that Mozart music and white noise are able to give positive influence on cognitive performance. However, most of the past studies gave more attention towards spatial task. Very little studies have been made on the effect of Mozart music and white noise towards memorizing task. Besides, the effect of these sounds on task difficulty has also not been studied deeply. Hence, the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of Mozart music and white noise on memory performance with different task difficulty levels in order to propose an effective background stimuli condition for memorization. Experiments have been conducted involving 60 adults that required them to memorize the visual memory task with two difficulty levels; i.e. easy and difficult. Brain signal was recorded during memorization duration using 10-20 electrode placement system of electroencephalography (EEG) machine. EEG is a neurological test for measuring and recording the electrical activity of the brain. The effect of sound stimuli on memory performance was evaluated based on memorization test score and brain activity. The wavelet approach was used in processing the EEG data. Based on the memorizing test score result, the subjects are able to memorize better when listening to white noise (easy: mean = 8.561; difficult: mean = 4.228) compared to Mozart music (easy: mean = 8.070; difficult: mean = 3.632) at different difficulty levels. Listening to auditory background stimuli can influence the electroencephalography pattern and brain activity. The level of attention, thinking, alertness and input information processing increases when listening to white noise which cause the increase of relative gamma and beta power. Thus, in this study, it is found that listening to white noise is far more effective in memorizing process compared to Mozart music.