The effect of background music on children's scientific creativity

Previous studies on background music and children's creativity have yielded conflicting conclusions, which may be due to the modulation of the effects of background music by task nature, music attributes, broadcast timing, and individual differences. We explored the effects of background music tempo and broadcast timing on prototype-based inventive thinking through two experiments. The results show that slow tempo background music enhances the children's retention of prototype knowledge, while fast tempo background music during the inventive thinking process promotes the fluency and flexibility of scientific inventive thinking but hinders novelty. Playing slow tempo background music during the learning of scientific knowledge can enhance the retention of scientific knowledge and improve scientific inventive thinking. Playing fast tempo background music during the inventive thinking process can change the attention pattern, processing efficiency, and information processing mode, thereby improving the fluency and flexibility of scientific inventive thinking.