![]() Some behavioural studies have shown that reading comprehension can be improved using background music, such as Mozart’s music 21, 22, 23, highly repetitive music with a narrow tonal range 24 and songs 25. Previous studies have primarily focused on the effects of background music on reading comprehension. Background music provides a unique window into how the brain works when music and cognitive tasks are presented simultaneously. Unlike speech or noise, music has a remarkable function of evoking and affecting listeners’ emotions 19, 20. Such an effect might be explained by the limited capacity theory of Kahneman 18, which posits that the amount of attention is limited, and performing multiple tasks leads to a competition for limited resources when their combined demands exceed the available resources, resulting in poor performance on one task due to an insufficient supply of attention. However, even when the background sounds are noise, this interference effect also occurs 15, 16, 17. This effect could be attributed to the same cognitive process used for focal tasks, such as semantic processing, when meaningful speech is used as the background stimulus 13, 14. 4), suggesting that task-irrelevant background speech disrupts the recall of visually presented digits 5, 6 and text 7, 8, proofreading 9, and sentence or passage comprehension 10, 11, 12. A typical example of this phenomenon is the irrelevant speech effect (for a review, see Vasilev et al. Even if people are instructed to focus on visual inputs while ignoring auditory inputs, the ignored background sounds still interfere with visual processing. Auditory inputs can hinder visual processing when both visual and auditory stimuli are presented 1, 2, 3. ![]() The human brain usually must manage multi-modal information, such as visual and auditory information, simultaneously in the real world. ![]() These findings suggest that background music affects neural responses during reading comprehension by increasing the difficulty of semantic integration, and thus extend the irrelevant sound effect to suggest that the neural processing of visually based cognitive tasks can also be affected by music. This outcome might have occurred because the arousal levels of the participants were not affected by the high- and low-arousal music throughout the experiment. The results showed that the N400 effect, elicited by world knowledge violations versus correct controls, was significantly smaller for silence than those for high- and low-arousal music backgrounds, with no significant difference between the two musical backgrounds. The participants’ arousal levels were reported during the experiment. Thirty-nine postgraduates judged the correctness of sentences about world knowledge without or with background music (high-arousal music and low-arousal music). The present study used event-related potentials to examine the effects of background music on neural responses during reading comprehension and their modulation by musical arousal. ![]() The effects of background speech or noise on visually based cognitive tasks has been widely investigated however, little is known about how the brain works during such cognitive tasks when music, having a powerful function of evoking emotions, is used as the background sound.
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