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Effects of background music on cognition: Brief
Background music listening and cognition are intertwined together in a way that makes each one of them affect the other. Cognition is the mental processor acquiring new knowledge and understanding of information through thought, senses and experience. Background music in this context refers to activating higher cognitive processes to perform a task while the task performer can hear/listen to music at the same time Listening to background music while trying to perform a cognitive task has proven to have an effect on our cognitive processes. The effect could sometimes be positive, and sometimes negative. The nature of the effect mostly depends on the type of music that is being played; whether it is fast tempo or slow tempo type of music. The type of music can also affect arousal levels. Arousal levels also depend on the tempo of the music. The magnitude of the effects is largely determined by the cognitive capacity of each individual.

Tempo and arousal
Fast tempo and major mode music tend to induce a more positive and a happy mood and higher arousal levels, while slow tempo and minor mode music induce a more negative and sad mood and lower arousal levels. According to the “arousal and mood hypothesis”, listening to music has a direct effect on human behaviour, and that effect is merely the impact that music imposes on our arousal levels. In specific, listening to music affects arousal, level of enjoyment and also mood, which all in turn collectively affect the cognitive processes and level of cognitive performance. The previous statement dictates that listening to low tempo music causes our cognitive process to be weaker to slower, and that the opposite may happen when listening to fast tempo music, our cognitive processes will become faster and more capable. The effects of these musically altered states of mood and arousal levels seem to vary across multiple cognitive functions such as visio-spatial processing which seems to have an increased effects when listening to background music on a high tempo type of music.

Cognitive Capacity
Cognitive capacity is defined as the total amount of information the brain is capable of processing at any given moment. This amount is has a limit, so we can say that the total capacity of humans is only ever 100%. The amount of cognitive capacity that being used in a particular task at any given moment is called the cognitive load. Doing activities that are habitual can lighten a heavy cognitive load, which allows us to do more than one task at once.

Experimental Results
In a research study done by: 1-Brain Connectivity Center, National Neurological Institute C. Mondino, Pavia, Italy 2-Brain and Behavioral Sciences Department, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy 3-Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Essex, UK, studying the effect of different types of background music listening on the cognitive tasks that require the usage of comparative memory to test the cognitive performance and also the effects of background music listening on cognitive processing speed. The general results dictate that there is an overall effect when performing a certain task while listening to background music compared to the condition of no music or white noise while performing the same task. These effects are not necessarily positive, in some cases the effects are negative. The results were tested under four different conditions: 1-no music 2-white noise 3-major mode classical musical piece 4-minor mode classical musical piece.

Episodic memory
Overall, the performance of episodic memory increased any of the two classical music pieces were played in the background compared to white noise and no music at all conditions. There wasn't any notable difference emerging between the two classical music conditions and not even between the two non-music conditions.

Semantic memory
Overall, the performance of tasks involving semantic memory performance were increased when listening to both musical conditions compared to the other conditions of no noise or white noise. The overall pattern of the effect of the independent variable on semantic memory is similar to the one we get in the free recall task.

Comparison of effects (Episodic memory vs Semantic memory)
The analysis showed a significant main effect of background condition, the results reflect higher memory performance in the music conditions compared to the no music conditions. This interaction is not particularly useful since it is simply a result of larger scores for minor mode music than major mode music in episodic memory, while the reverse occurred in the semantic memory related tasks. In a similar way, better scores were scored with the white noise condition compared to the no music condition in the episodic memory related tasks, while the opposite was reported in the semantic memory related tasks.

Effects on processing speed
The main effect of background music listening conditions were significant. The analysis shows a significant increase of the major mode music condition when performing tasks that are related to processing speed over the white noise condition, the minor mode music condition, and also showed a significant increase over the no-musical condition that could not even rise to significance levels. The minor mode music condition did not differentiate significantly from the white noise white, nor did it differ from the no-music condition. Finally, there wasn't any notable difference between the two controlled conditions. However, the analysis shows that the major mode music condition was associated with the highest performance speed and that this is the only condition that seemed to differ from the other conditions as the others had manifested similar results and effects.

The mood questionnaire
To ensure the authenticity and integrity of the study, the researchers ran a questionnaire to help analyse the scores to prove that the two classical music pieces that had different modes induced a positive effect (for major mode music) and also a negative effect (for minor mode music). The questionnaire was a self reported mood measure to test what kind of induced mood will the different conditions produce. However all the conditions were questions except for the no noise or music condition because there was a big significant effect for all the conditions compared to the no noise condition.

"Happier" results
The first part of the questionnaire was for evaluating how happy were the participants feeling under the test conditions. The major mode musical piece received the highest scores in regards of how happy are the moods of participants. The major mode musical piece scored significantly higher results than the minor mode musical piece did, however, minor mode musical did not differ significantly than the white noise condition.

"Sadder" results
The second part of the questionnaire was for evaluating how sad were the participants feeling under the test conditions. From the analysis of the results, it shows that the minor mode musical piece induces the biggest "sad" effect and scored the highest among all the conditions, however the score was not for off from white noise so the results are comparable. Major mode music scored the least on the "sadness" scale in the questionnaire.

Discussion Summary
In the end, using a more pragmatic approach, the results of this research gave positive message. Background music listening can represent a relatively inexpensive and non-invasive way to increase these cognitive processes and abilities that are crucial to the daily living oh human beings. The authors also stated the following statement to insure that there was no conflict of interest "The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationship that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest."