The Impact of Background Music on Students' Cognitive Performance in Puzzle Solving

Urban learning environments frequently expose students to unwanted ambient noise, leading many to use instrumental music as a masking strategy despite mixed evidence on its effectiveness. This study examined how background ambience influences puzzle-solving accuracy among college students in Bacolod City, Philippines. Thirty undergraduates were randomly assigned to a Control Group (No Music) or an Experimental Group (Instrumental Lo-fi Music) using a two-independent-groups design. Participants completed a standardized word-search task across three difficulty levels—Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced—within a fixed time limit. The results showed a significant main effect of ambience on performance, with students in the No Music condition consistently achieving higher accuracy across all puzzle stages. Performance gaps were most pronounced in the Beginner and Advanced levels, indicating that both low-demand and high-demand tasks were adversely affected by instrumental music. No significant interaction emerged between group and difficulty level, suggesting that the performance pattern remained stable regardless of task complexity. Overall, the findings demonstrate that even non-lyrical instrumental music can impair accuracy in time-constrained cognitive tasks, highlighting silence as the more advantageous auditory environment for puzzle-solving performance.