Divided Attention - Does Listening to Music While Studying Influence Performance ?

Our advanced cognitive abilities are the most important features that make us separate from other living things in the world. This ability including perception, recognition, formation leads us to benefit from world resources and enables us to bring ourselves and the world into constant change and development. What is the first step of successfully utilizing these resources? What provides us to think about something to use it?

Perceiving a particular thing begins with giving attention to it, as will be predicted. But while there are hundreds of objects, livings, events, and tasks in the world, is it possible to give our attention to them all, as being the most advanced creatures on earth? Would that be useful to us, even if it was possible? Cognitive psychologists have made a lot of studies to examine human being’s attention capacities and reached critical findings. The most important issue under this topic is giving our attention to multiple things at the same time and keep it on those things to be able to work on them, which can be defined as being multitasking in daily language.

We are literally in the age of speed. We have a lot of work and little time to do. In job advertisements, we frequently see the word "multitasking" as a desired characteristic in applicants. Not for only business life, but also, we have limited time to ourselves. That's why we are trying to live our private life with tasks that we have to accomplish. While families are doing office work which they brought home, they also talk with their kids about their days; students take their homework to friends' meetings; people running on the streets to catch the bus try to pay attention to the traffic lights and at the same talking to their relatives on the phone. In short, in a world that much demanding, the importance of being multitasking is not surprising and cognitive psychology is one of the main areas trying to make this issue clear in-depth.

In cognitive psychology, giving attention to more than one thing at the same time is called divided attention. Under this title, researchers examine the boundary of attention and conditions shaping this boundary. One of the most common ways to assess divided attention is dual-task experiments which require participants to engage in a couple of tasks at the same time. Then, they analyze the performance of participants in those tasks. One of the most common examples of dual tasks is performing on a specific test while there is a piece of music in the background. Because many people, especially students think that it is an enjoyable activity that does not require effort, listening to music is frequently preferred when studying with the assumption that it will make the boring homework, lessons, readings a little fun. But does the research support this assumption?

Researchers found that it depends on the amount of mental resources that you should give to one task and it also depends on the type of the task. Some mental resources are specific only to some type of tasks. Due to its specificity, it is difficult to use the same resource in two different tasks for the brain (Reisberg, 2010). For example, turning one of our arms from right to left while trying to turn the other arm from left to right is hard enough to say that it is almost impossible. Because both two tasks require motor cognition abilities, this causes interference among them which inhibits the performance. However, guessing how would be easy watching a documentary on television and at the same time turning one arm from right to left is not difficult. Because this time, we use different mental resources to accomplish tasks. In this respect, it is possible to predict the conditions under which listening to music will reduce performance. For the tasks that require verbal abilities such as reading and writing, listening to music including lyrics may distract your attention because of interference between the two. For this time, you try to use the same mental resource for two tasks and divide your attention in two. If you are a person who says I cannot live without music, what you can do in this respect is to make the music as dissimilar as possible to your task. For example, try to listen to music while studying mathematics. From the Specificity of Resources perspective, they should not interfere with each other because mathematics requires numerical calculations rather than verbal resources which listening to music needs (Reisberg, 2010). Try to remember music on lists to listen to while reading, studying, working, etc. if you've had a chance to take a look at them before. The music in these lists generally without lyrics. Probably, it has thought to have a less adverse impact on reading because there are no words that your attention would try to catch up.

Empirical findings are important, but some might say " I know people who are really good at listening to songs and reading long texts at the same time". Yes, it is possible. Because as always, other variables should be taken into account while we are talking about human beings. For instance, we should consider the practice effect. Practicing a task again and again causes one to be a master of it. Being a master on a task means it does not require much mental resources to perform it as does before (Reisberg, 2010). So, dividing attention for any other task becomes easier. In that regard, we might say that those friends are so much studying or reading so that music is no longer affecting their performance. Apart from all, as always again, notice that individual differences have the power to cause different results. 

At the beginning of the paper, I mentioned how being a multitasking people is a very favorable feature these days. Despite these demanding conditions of the world, cognitive psychology reveals that the functioning of our cognition is not perfect and that although we are the most developed creatures on earth, we have limits. Studies of divided attention on studying with music show that doing more than one task has not always positive outcomes. Especially if the task in hand requires a lot of mental energy, or if two tasks are so similar to each other, it is likely to cause a decrease in performance. That is, when we try to save our time, we are waiving the quality of the task. Therefore, it would be beneficial to engage in multitasks after considering these factors. 

Reference

Reisberg, D. (2010). Cognition. 4th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, pp.116-124.