Tempo, arousal and the underlying mechanisms of the Mozart Effect

There is a great deal of inconsistent literature regarding the potential cognitive performance enhancement elicited by priming with music listening. This phenomenon has been coined the Mozart Effect and four theoretical models have been constructed to explain it. The first is the Neuro-priming model, which attributes performance differences to cortical firing pattern elicited by music listening. The second is the arousal model which uses arousal changes to explain performance differences. The third is the mood model which explains performance difference through changes in affect. The last is the valence model which associates performance differences to participants' level of preference to the music. This thesis describes two experiments that were conducted to determine which of these theories best explained the underlying mechanism of the Mozart Effect. The results did not support the arousal and mood models and appear to support the valence and neuro-priming models.