Background music and cognitive task performance: systematic review dataset

This repository contains the raw data used for a systematic review of the impact of background music on cognitive task performance (Cheah et al., 2022). Our intention is to facilitate future updates to this work.

Contents description

This repository contains eight Microsoft Excel files, each containing the synthesised data pertaining to each of the six cognitive domains analysed in the review, as well as task difficulty, and population characteristics:

• raw-data-attention
• raw-data-inhibition
• raw-data-language
• raw-data-memory
• raw-data-thinking
• raw-data-processing-speed
• raw-data-task-difficulty
• raw-data--population

Files description

Tabs organisation

The files pertaining to each cognitive domain include individual tabs for each cognitive task analysed (c.f. Figure 2 in the original paper for the list of cognitive tasks). The file with the population characteristics data also contains separate tabs for each characteristic (extraversion, music training, gender, and working memory capacity).

Tabs contents

In all files and tabs, each row corresponds to the data of a test. The same article can have more than one row if it reports multiple tests. For instance, the study by Cassidy and MacDonald (2007; cf. Memory.xlsx, tab: Memory-all) contains two experiments (immediate and delayed free recall) each with multiple test (immediate free recall: tests 25 – 32; delayed free recall: tests 58 – 61). Each test (one per row), in this experiment, pertains to comparisons between conditions where the background music has different levels of arousal, between groups of participants with different extraversion levels, between different tasks material (words or paragraphs) and different combinations of the previous (e.g., high arousing music vs silence test among extraverts whilst completing an immediate free recall task involving paragraphs; cf. test 30).

The columns are organised as follows:

• "TESTS": the index of the test in a particular tab (for easy reference);
• "ID": abbreviation of the cognitive tasks involved in a specific experiment (see glossary for meaning);
• "REFERENCE": the article where the data was taken from (see main publications for list of articles);
• "CONDITIONS": an abbreviated description of the music condition of a given test;
• "MEANS (music)": the average performance across all participants in a given experiment with background music;
• "MEANS (silence)": the average performance across all participants in a given experiment without background music.

Then, in horizontal arrangement, we also include groups of two columns that breakdown specific comparisons related to each test (i.e., all tests comparing the same two types of condition, e.g., L-BgM vs I-BgM, will appear under the same set of columns). For each one, we indicate mean difference between the respective conditions ("MD" column) and the direction of effect ("Standard Metric" column). Each file also contains a "Glossary" tab that explains all the abbreviations used in each document.

Bibliography

Cheah, Y., Wong, H. K., Spitzer, M., & Coutinho, E. (2022). Background music and cognitive task performance: A systematic review of task, music and population impact. Music & Science, 5(1), 1-38. https://doi.org/10.1177/20592043221134392