Music and cognitive abilities: A look at the Mozart Effect

Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky (1993) demonstrated that listening to complexly composed music produced bilateral activation of the brain, which augmented cognitive processes. Specifically, they found that listening to the Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K.448) enhanced spatial reasoning and their subsequent studies have shown that this effect is long-term. The media have coined their findings as the Mozart Effect. This study extends the work of Rauscher and colleagues by investigating the influence of the Mozart Effect has on memory in 24 children who are five-years-old. These children were recruited from day-care centers in urban and suburban municipalities in New Jersey. A random sampling method was used to determine which condition each child would participate in this study. Thirteen children were assigned to a listening condition and 11 children were selected to a silent condition. Both groups were handed a popular coloring book and asked to choose and color any of the designs in the book. The Mozart musical selection was played for those in the listening condition while they were coloring; those children in control condition colored in silence for a 10 minute period. The children were administered selected subtests from The Children's Memory Scale when this time elapsed. The present research project used a post-test-only control group design. The hypothesis that those children who listened to Mozart (K.448) would perform significantly better than those from the silent condition in any of the three memory domains (i.e. auditory-verbal; visual-nonverbal; attention and concentration) along with a measure that assessed learning was not supported.