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People often listen to music while doing cognitive tasks. Yet, whether music harms or helps performance is still debated. Here, we assessed the objective and subjective effects of music with and without lyrics on four cognitive tasks. College students completed tasks of verbal and visual memory, reading comprehension, and arithmetic under three conditions: silence, instrumental music, and music with lyrics. Participants judged their learning during and after each condition. Music with lyrics hindered verbal memory, visual memory, and reading comprehension (d ≈ –0.3), whereas its negative effect (d = –.19) on arithmetic was not credible. Instrumental music (hip-hop lo-fi) did not credibly hinder or improve performance. Participants were aware of the detrimental impact of the lyrics. Instrumental music was, however, sometimes perceived as beneficial. Our results corroborate the general distracting effect of background music. However, faulty metacognition about music’s interfering effect cannot fully explain why students often listen to music while studying.

It is usually assumed that articulatory rehearsal improves verbal working memory. Complex span is the most used paradigm to assess working memory functioning; yet, we still lack knowledge about how participants rehearse in this task, and whether these rehearsals are beneficial. In Experiment 1, we investigated the patterns of naturally occurring overt rehearsals in a complex span task requiring processing of a non-verbal distractor task. For comparison, another group of participants completed a matched simple span task with an unfilled delay in between the memoranda. Time permitting, participants rehearsed the memory list in forward serial order, a strategy known as cumulative rehearsal. The degree of cumulative rehearsal was correlated with recall accuracy in both span tasks. Rehearsal frequency was, however, reduced in complex span compared to simple span. To assess the causal role of rehearsal in complex span, we trained a group of participants in a cumulative rehearsal strategy in Experiment 2. This instruction substantially increased the prevalence of cumulative rehearsals compared to a control group. However, the increase in cumulative rehearsal did not translate into an increase in recall accuracy. Our results provide further evidence that rehearsal does not benefit working memory performance.

Visual working memory and verbal storage are often investigated independently of one another. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that naming visual stimuli can provide an advantage in performance during visual working memory tasks. On the other hand, there is also evidence that labeling could lead to biases in recall. Here, we present an exploratory investigation of verbal labels associated with the memorization of simple visuo-spatial stimuli, and how the use of these labels informs recall behavior of the same stimuli in a separate working memory task. English-speaking participants performed a working memory task with orientation and location stimuli, followed by a separate naming task featuring the same stimuli. We found a diverse set of labels employed frequently and with a consistent distribution across stimulus types, the stimulus space, and among participants. The use of individual spatial words, predicted class 1 cardinal biases in memory (i.e. the observation that cardinal stimuli are more accurately recalled than non-cardinal ones). Conversely, words expressing uncertainty (e.g. 'slightly', 'near') predicted class 2 cardinal bias (i.e. recall biases away from the cardinal planes). This relationship between word use and recall biases is consistent with shared representational resources that are used for both visuo-spatial and verbal working memory., Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare., (Copyright: © 2025 The Author(s).)