The Mozart effect & Music and Spatial Task Performance
Courtney Corkill
PSY 363: Cognitive Psychology
Argosy University
August 1st, 2014

The research hypothesis for Music and Spatial Task Performance is that listening to Mozart may have more of a positive effect on task performance than a relaxation tape or silence. The independent variables are the three groups that are music, silence, and relaxation tape. These are the independent variables because these are what can be manipulated (Gonzalez, C.). The dependent variable is the performance that is measured at the end of each test or experiment. Some variables that the researched were able to control in their study were the sound, or listening conditions, and the environment …show more content…
In the article, The Mozart effect, Jenkins goes over the discrepancies against the study, as well as the different experiments done over time. The first discrepancy was that people were starting to wonder if it was “music enjoyment” as opposed to an actual change in the functioning of the brain. The first experiment had a sample of rats that were studied. The rats were subjected to Mozart’s piano music, Philip Glass’s minimalist music (simple music), white noise (random noise) and silence, while in in the womb still and then for 2 months after birth (Jenkins, J. S.). The Mozart group finished the quiz not only quicker but also with fewer mistakes. A second study of the brain showed that during a PET scan, music appreciation lights up many areas of the brain, showing that it is not necessarily the music enjoyment but the fact that music is stimulating multiple parts of the brain (Jenkins, J. S.). Another type of experiment was tested on 29 patients who were in a comatose and had epileptical episodes, each of them were to listen to Mozart’s piano music. One patient’s epileptic bursts were active 62% of the time but when listening to Mozart, the bursts drastically subsided to 21% (Jenkins, J. S.). To me this is not because of musical enjoyment but because the brain is being active and using brain cells instead of letting them degenerate from