You, Your Music and Your Work : A quantitative study into the relationship between listening to music, task performance and individual differences

Abstract: Simultaneously listening to music whilst doing other tasks has become more common with the development of mobile technology and the rise of streaming platforms, but what affect does listening to music have on task performance? There have been several theories on this both advocating for and against the effects of music. This study has two primary questions to answer. Does background noise (condition 1: no music, condition 2: music with words, condition 3: same music without words) influence reading comprehension, and does how well individuals perform on complex tasks correlate with individual differences particularly their ability to media multitask and their boredom proneness. The findings are generally in-line with the consensus of prior research that music does have a negative impact on complex tasks when compared to performing them without auditory stimuli. Although there are differences depending on what stimuli is used. A correlation was found that has not been extensively studied by prior research to my knowledge. It pertains to the relationship of media multitasking and boredom proneness. It seems like the higher an individual’s MM score is the lower their BP score will be, on average. What implications this might have for the larger attention research field needs to be further explored before any inference can be made. The ANOVA and regression results for the other variables showed no significant correlations.