The effects of background music on the work attention performance between musicians and non-musicians

Abstract

For occupational safety and ergonomics, the relationship between work attention performance and background music is a trend for the future. Attention performance may be influenced by some personal factors, such as experience of music training. This investigation explores the difference between the attention performance of musicians and that of non-musicians based on a quasi-experimental design to gain a preliminary understanding of the possible effect of background music on the attention performance of both groups. This study found that a musician's attention performance is better than a non-musician's and that background music tends to improve the attention performance of both musicians and non-musicians, but to a greater extent for musicians.

Keywords:

• music training
• attention
• background music

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the National Science Council of Taiwan for financially supporting this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yi-Nuo Shih http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3316-2738