THE MOZART EFFECT : An Artifact of Preference

The “Mozart effect” reported by Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky (1993, 1995) indicates that spatial-temporal abilities are enhanced after listening to music composed by Mozart. We replicated and extended the effect in Experiment 1: Performance on a spatial-temporal task was better after participants listened to a piece composed by Mozart or by Schubert than after they sat in silence. In Experiment 2, the advantage for the music condition disappeared when the control condition consisted of a narrated story instead of silence. Rather, performance was a function of listeners’preference (music or story), with better performance following the preferred condition. Claims that exposure to music composed by Mozart improves spatial-temporal abilities (Rauscher, Shaw, & Ky, 1993, 1995) have received widespread attention in the news media. Based on these findings, Georgia Governor Zell Miller recently budgeted for a compact disc or cassette for each infant born in state. Reports published in Science(Holden, 1994), the APA Monitor(Martin, 1994), and the popular press indicate that scientists and the general public are giving serious consideration to the possibility that music listening and music lessons improve other abilities. If these types of associations can be confirmed, the implications would be considerable. For example, listening to music could improve the performance of pilots and structural engineers. Such associations would also provide evidence against contemporary theories of modularity (Fodor, 1983) and multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1993), which argue for independence of functioning across domains. Although facilitation in spatial-temporal performance following exposure to music (Rauscher et al., 1993, 1995) is temporary (10 to 15 min), long-term improvements in spatial-temporal reasoning as a consequence of music lessons have also been reported (Gardiner, Fox, Knowles, & Jeffrey, 1996; Rauscher et al., 1997). Unfortunately, the media have not been careful to distinguish these disparate findings. The purpose of the present study was to provide a more complete explanation of the short-term phenomenon. Rauscher and her colleagues have proposed that the so-called Mozart effect can be explained by the trion model (Leng & Shaw, 1991), which posits that exposure to complex musical compositions excites cortical firing patterns similar to those used in spatial-temporal reasoning, so that performance on spatial-temporal tasks is positively affected by exposure to music. On the surface, the Mozart effect is similar to robust psychological phenomena such as transfer or priming. For example, the effect could be considered an instance of positive, nonspecific transfer across domains and modalities (i.e., music listening and visual-spatial performance) that do not have a well-documented association. Transfer is said to occur when knowledge or skill acquired in one situation influences performance in another (Postman, 1971). In the case of the Mozart effect, however, passive listening to music—rather than overt learning—influences spatial-temporal performance. The Mozart effect also bears similarities to associative priming effects and spreading activation (Collins & Loftus, 1975). But priming effects tend to disappear when the prime and the target have few features in common (Klimesch, 1994, ), and cross-modal priming effects are typically weak (Roediger & McDermott, 1993). Moreover, it is far from obvious which features are shared by stimuli as diverse as a Mozart sonata and a spatial-temporal task. In short, the Mozart effect described by Rauscher et al. (1993, 1995) is difficult to situate in a context of known cognitive phenomena. Stough, Kerkin, Bates, and Mangan (1994) failed to replicate the findings of Rauscher et al., although their use of Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices rather than spatial tasks from the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (Rauscher et al., 1993, 1995) to assess spatial abilities may account for the discrepancies. Whereas tasks measuring spatial recognition (such as the Raven’s test) require a search for physical similarities among visually presented stimuli, spatial-temporal tasks (e.g., the Paper Folding and Cutting, PF&C, subtest of the StanfordBinet; mental rotation tasks; jigsaw puzzles) require mental transformation of the stimuli (Rauscher & Shaw, 1998). In their review of previous successes and failures at replicating the Mozart effect, Rauscher and Shaw (1998) concluded that the effect is obtainable only with spatial-temporal tasks. Our goal in Experiment 1 was to replicate and extend the basic findings of Rauscher et al. (1993, 1995). A completely computercontrolled procedure was used to test adults’ performance on a PF&C task immediately after they listened to music or sat in silence. Half of the participants listened to Mozart during the music condition; the other half listened to Schubert. The purpose of Experiment 2 was to test the hypothesis that the Mozart effect is actually a consequence of participants’ preference for one testing condition over another, the assumption being that better performance would follow the preferred condition. Control conditions in Rauscher et al. (1993) included a period of silence or listening to a relaxation tape, both of which might have been less interesting or arousing than listening to a Mozart sonata. Consequently, if the participants in that study preferred the Mozart condition, this factor might account for the differential performance on the spatial-temporal task that followed. In a subsequent experiment (Rauscher et al., 1995), comparison conditions involved silence or a combination of minimalist music (Philip Glass), a taped short story, and repetitive dance music. Minimalist and repetitive music might also induce boredom or low levels of arousal, much like silence, and the design precluded direct comparison of the short-story and music conditions. Indeed, in all other instances in which the Mozart effect has been successfully replicated (see Rauscher & Shaw, 1998), control conditions consisted of sitting in silence or listening to relaxation tapes or repetitive music. In Experiment 2, our control condition involved simply listening to a short story. Address correspondence to E. Glenn Schellenberg, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto at Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L5L 1C6;  g.schellenberg@utoronto.ca.  Kristin M. Nantais and E. Glenn Schellenberg