Attention is a cognitive ability essential to our daily lives and one of the key productive factors in the modern economy. It is a way of prioritizing information. Our capacity to acquire and process information is fundamentally limited. Attending to one task or source of information necessarily excludes other potential efforts.

Individual resources (e.g., cognitive ability) and environmental factors (e.g., the presence of reward or stimulation) influence attention capacity. Music, as an external factor, can improve attention. Music isn’t just for entertainment. Research shows that listening to music improves performance on attention tasks (Kiss, 2021). Listening to music can help make tedious assignments easier to endure.

Music listening affects attention in various ways (Mendes, 2021):

Music causes a narrowing of attention, allowing our minds to filter out distractions. Music helps to decrease stress and cortisol, which allows the brain’s attention center to operate without interruption.

Music might also promote an attentional conflict. For example, when driving in an unfamiliar area, we tend to turn down the music because it acts as a........

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