title: Turn Off the Music! Music Impairs Visual Associative Memory Performance in Older Adults.
abstract: Whether we are explicitly listening to it or not, music is prevalent in our environment. Surprisingly, little is known about the effect of environmental music on concurrent cognitive functioning and whether young and older adults are differentially affected by music. Here, we investigated the impact of background music on a concurrent paired associate learning task in healthy young and older adults.
  
  
  
  Young and older adults listened to music or to silence while simultaneously studying face-name pairs. Participants' memory for the pairs was then tested while listening to either the same or different music. Participants also made subjective ratings about how distracting they found each song to be.
  
  
  
  Despite the fact that all participants rated music as more distracting to their performance than silence, only older adults' associative memory performance was impaired by music. These results are most consistent with the theory that older adults' failure to inhibit processing of distracting task-irrelevant information, in this case background music, contributes to their memory impairments.
  
  
  
  These data have important practical implications for older adults' ability to perform cognitively demanding tasks even in what many consider to be an unobtrusive environment.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia. sreaves3@gatech.edu.
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Reaves
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia.
authors.forename: Brittany
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Graham
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Grahn
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia.
authors.forename: Parissa
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rabannifard
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia.
authors.forename: Audrey
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Duarte
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology / Q000523:psychology*; D001245:Association Learning; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011939:Mental Recall; D009146:Music; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Cognition; Memory; Music; Psychology of aging/psychiatry