Study on the influence of Alpha wave music on working memory based on EEG

Working memory (WM), which plays a vital role in daily activities, is a memory system that temporarily stores and processes information when people are engaged in complex cognitive activities. The influence of music on WM has been widely studied. In this work, we conducted a series of n-back memory experiments with different task difficulties and multiple trials on 14 subjects under the condition of no music and Alpha wave leading music. The analysis of behavioral data show that the change of music condition has significant effect on the accuracy and time of memory reaction (p<0.01), both of which are improved after the stimulation of Alpha wave music. Behavioral results also suggest that short-term training has no significant impact on working memory. In the further analysis of electrophysiology (EEG) data recorded in the experiment, auto-regressive (AR) model is employed to extract features, after which an average classification accuracy of 82.9% is achieved with support vector machine (SVM) classifier in distinguishing between before and after WM enhancement. The above findings indicate that Alpha wave leading music can improve WM, and the combination of AR model and SVM classifier is effective in detecting the brain activity changes resulting from music stimulation.