This study draws together two sorts of work -- attempts to improve vigilance performance and use of background music in industrial settings --to explore how background music affects performance on a vigilance task. Fourteen subjects were tested on a simple disjunctive reaction time task, which gave eight stimuli in an hour's session. The independent variable was music (a specially programmed Musk tape recording) vs. continuous noise (a small fan in the experimental room). The performance of subjects who worked while hearing noise did not change significantly during the hour. However, the subjects who heard background music responded significantly better (faster) during the latter two-thirds of the hour than they had at first. Also, the music group performed significantly better in the middle third of the hour than during the last third. Other tests, comparing the groups with each other, rather than with themselves, did not demonstrate significant differences with the number of subjects used.
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