While many things can distract drivers, such as mobile phones, it appears that music does not fit into this category. In fact, some motorists are more focused when listening to music, new research suggests.

A Swedish psychologist used a simulator to assess the effects of driving to music among experienced drivers aged 25-35. She found that the commonly held belief that drivers listening to music drive too fast or ignore rules of the road simply did not hold true.

"I found nothing to support this view in my research. On the contrary, our test subjects enjoyed listening to the music and did their utmost to be responsible drivers. They sometimes drove better while listening to music," Ayça Berfu Ünal of the University of Groningen said.

She used a number of different scenarios to test drivers. For example, in one test, participants were asked to drive behind another vehicle for 30 minutes on a quiet road.

"As you would expect, it became very tedious. But the people who listened to music were more focused on driving and performed better than those without music. It's fairly logical - people need a certain degree of ‘arousal' to stop themselves getting bored. In monotonous traffic situations, music is a good distraction that helps you keep your mind on the road," she explained.

She noted that drivers need to concentrate more when dealing with busy urban traffic compared to quiet roads and often, their natural reaction is to turn the music down or off. However this was not allowed during the study. But it showed that drivers on busy roads tended to concentrate more on the traffic and could not even remember what music had been playing.

"Safety comes first at moments like this and the participants were able to block out the distraction. This also occurs when drivers are asked to perform a special manoeuvre, such as reversing into a parking space. Our findings do not indicate that people listening to music drive less well in busy traffic. The research showed that background music can actually help motorists to concentrate, both in busy and quiet traffic," she said.

Ms Ünal did not look at the effects of listening to talk radio, however she did note that people tend to concentrate more on items such as the news or a talk show, especially if the item is interesting to them.

"That's why making phone calls in the car is so dangerous. Talking on the phone while driving makes huge mental demands on motorists," she pointed out.

She concluded that music makes little difference to a driver's performance, although she appealed to motorists to know their limits.

"Some people are much more affected by loud music than others. I'd also be interested to see whether older motorists of 70 and above, and young people learning to drive, cope with the distraction of the radio in the same way.

"I could imagine that music might be too distracting while you're just learning to drive. And at the other end of the scale, people's cognitive capacities diminish as they get older so I'm curious to know how they react to the mental demands of driving at the same time as the listening to music," she added.