Wilson and Brown (1997) report on an experiment reexamining the effect found in earlier experiments when Mozart's music was played and improved spatial-task performance. These earlier experiments suggested that listening to Mozart's music enhances performance on mathematical and spatial-reasoning tasks. this experiment was intended to test this earlier outcome. In the experiment, 22 college undergraduates listened to a presentation of Mozart's music, and they were then examined under carefully controlled experimental conditions. Each subject performed a pencil-and-paper maze task after a ten-minute presentation under each of three listening conditions--1) a piano concerto by Mozart; 2) repetitive relaxation music; and 3) silence. The mazes used varied in the complexity of solution and in their size. There were nine such mazes in three sets.
The researchers used a 3 x 3 square design in which both the listening conditions and the complexity of the maze were within-subject, and the participants were randomly assigned to one of three presentation orders for the listening conditions. one presentation order was examined on each of the separate days, and the same tape-recorded instructions were used for each group. the researchers focused on four measures o maze performance--they first counted the number of mazes completed within each condition as an overall measure of performance; a second accuracy measure was made with a count for each maze of the number of times a person took a path leading to a dead end; they measured a gross assessment of the quality of each maze solution; and they counted the number of times participants lifted up their pens and broke the solution path.
The researchers found that listening to Mozart can indeed enhance performance on some measures of spatial reasoning. At the same time, though, the researchers find that listening to passages of repetitive relaxation music can also enhance spatial-task p...