A small pilot study exploring the brain activity of young adults found that listening to preferred Japanese pop music was associated with higher descriptive scores in visual memory and subjective focus compared to unpleasant noise or silence. While the results were not statistically significant, the research provides a framework for testing how everyday listening habits relate to learning and attention. The findings were published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Many students habitually listen to music while they review class materials or prepare for exams. Popular media often highlights a supposed cognitive boost from classical music, an idea frequently branded as the Mozart effect. But very few university students actually select classical instrumental pieces for their daily study routines.
Instead, contemporary students frequently choose popular music with familiar lyrics. This habit presents a puzzle for cognitive researchers. Meaningful speech and background vocals can easily disrupt the human brain as it attempts to process language and memorize verbal facts.
Listening to a favorite pop song with lyrics might logically act as a distraction that pulls attention away from educational materials. Conversely, familiar and enjoyable music can elevate a person’s mood, reduce stress, and increase overall motivation to complete a difficult task.
Different types of learning might also respond differently to musical background noise. While reading comprehension and verbal memorization often suffer when background lyrics are present, recalling visual information might be less susceptible to the exact same interference.
Researchers are working to understand if preferred background music can support efficient memory processing through emotional engagement. They are looking at neural mechanisms that are entirely distinct from those typically emphasized in traditional classical music narratives.
Yoshiko Tojo, a researcher at the Ibaraki Prefectural University of Health Sciences in Japan, wanted to understand this dynamic in a realistic context. Tojo aimed to see how self-selected Japanese pop music, commonly known as J-Pop, relates to visual memory retrieval and regional brain activity.
Tojo recruited healthy university students for a small brain imaging pilot study. After exclusions for incomplete data, the final analysis included five participants. The participants completed a visual memory test while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner.
This imaging technology tracks blood flow in the brain to measure neural activity in real time. The visual memory task began with an encoding phase. Participants viewed sets of emotionally neutral photographs, such as everyday animals and food items.
They were asked to memorize both the specific objects and the exact order in which they appeared on the screen. Later, the participants answered true or false statements about the images to test their recall. They performed this retrieval task under three different auditory conditions.
In the first condition, participants listened to a J-Pop song they had personally selected beforehand as pleasant and comfortable. The second condition featured an abrasive composite sound made of ambulance sirens and earthquake early warning alarms. The final condition served as a baseline, featuring no sound other than the continuous rhythmic thumping of the scanner itself.
Following the memory tests, participants rated their subjective ability to focus during each auditory condition on a visual scale. They also rated the pleasantness of each sound environment. Tojo then analyzed both the behavioral performance and the brain activity data to see how the auditory contexts compared.
The behavioral data showed distinct patterns across the three listening environments. Participants achieved the highest average recall accuracy, answering correctly roughly 82 percent of the time, while listening to their preferred J-Pop music. In the baseline condition with no added sound, accuracy averaged about 76 percent.
The abrasive alarm sounds yielded the lowest recall accuracy at just 71 percent. The subjective focus ratings closely mirrored these results, with participants reporting the highest concentration during the J-Pop condition.
Brain scan data revealed shifting activity in specific neural regions depending on the background noise. Tojo focused heavily on the anterior insula, an area of the brain involved in evaluating subjective emotions, sensing internal body states, and managing large-scale attention networks.
During the J-Pop condition, participants showed higher average activity in the anterior insula compared to the other two conditions. This elevated activity suggests the familiar music might have engaged brain areas responsible for processing positive emotions and maintaining sustained task engagement.
Tojo also examined the temporo-occipital visual association cortex, a region at the back of the brain responsible for higher order visual processing and memory. Activity in this visual region was highest during the unpleasant alarm condition and lowest in the silent baseline condition.
This increased visual brain activity during the alarm condition might indicate that participants had to work harder to process the images when exposed to abrasive noise. But because the sample size was restricted to only five people, these behavioral and neural differences were not statistically significant.
The limited number of participants is the primary constraint of this research. The small sample size heavily restricts statistical power, meaning the results cannot be generalized to broader populations without further testing.
The experimental design also utilized different sets of pictures for each sound condition. This approach prevented participants from simply recognizing images they had already seen in previous rounds. But it also introduces the possibility that some image sets were inherently easier to remember than others.
The research focused exclusively on a visual memory task and a single genre of popular music. It is unknown if similar emotional and neural patterns would appear for verbal learning tasks, such as reading a textbook or memorizing vocabulary words.
Future studies with larger and more diverse groups of participants are needed to verify these trends. Expanding the research could reveal exactly when and for whom studying with background music might be beneficial.
These initial observations do not establish that listening to preferred music inherently improves memory performance. They do suggest that listening to emotionally positive background music is not universally detrimental to studying, opening the door for larger investigations into how personal listening habits affect the brain.
The study, “Preferred J-pop music and visual memory retrieval: an exploratory pilot fMRI study,” was authored by Yoshiko Tojo.