Effects of Verbal Information in Background Music on Mental Task and its Relation to Cerebral Blood Flow

Abstract

In today's society, there is a lot of desk work, and in schools and workplaces, people need to be able to perform various tasks efficiently and with concentration. The work environment has a significant impact on the efficiency of desk work. This study investigates the effects of background music on work and cerebral blood flow during mental tasks. In this study, we used NIRS to measure and verify changes in cerebral blood flow in collaborators who calculated and memorized English words while listening to background music. In particular, we hypothesized and tested that the presence or absence of vocals in the background music would affect cerebral blood flow. We adopted a block design as our experimental method for measuring cerebral blood flow. The descriptive statistics values, maximum, minimum, mean, and variance, were calculated from the measurement results of cerebral blood flow, and a box plot represented the size distribution. The experimental results showed that the variance of cerebral blood flow between collaborators was more significant during computational tasks than at rest. The group that contained verbal information had higher overall cerebral blood flow than the group that did not. Besides, cerebral blood flow was lower during the task than during rest.