Date of Award
1-1-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A. in Psychology
First Advisor
Matthew Reysen
Second Advisor
Nicolaas Prins
Third Advisor
Marilyn Mendolia
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
Arousal is known to influence the manner in which spatial stimuli are processed and remembered. Although music is considered a spatial stimulus, the relationship between music-induced arousal through music listening and spatial ability remains understudied. This study was designed to determine whether arousal induced by musical stimuli differentially impacts memory performance on a map learning task created to measure spatial memory. Participants were exposed to two different pieces of music selected to induce either high or low arousal or were exposed to a control condition in which music was not presented. Participants listened to music or completed multiplication problems prior to encoding and recall was assessed fifteen minutes following the encoding phase. It was hypothesized that music inducing high arousal would produce enhanced performance on the spatial task in comparison to the control condition. It was also predicted that low arousal music would hamper performance on the map learning task in comparison to the control condition. We did not find a statistically significant difference in spatial memory performance among the low arousal condition, the high arousal condition and control condition. However, we did find a significant difference between the high and low arousal conditions between individuals with less than one year of musical training. For those participants, listening to music that induces low arousal yielded better recall than music that induces high arousal. This difference suggests that musicians and non-musicians may differentially process musical stimuli.
Recommended Citation
Joyner, April Marie, "Effects of Music-Induced Arousal on Spatial Cognition" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2823.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2823