Reassessing the Mozart Effect: Musicians and Non-Musicians Respond Differently to Late Eighteenth-Century, Non-Texted Music for a Monochromatic Instrument

Recent accumulating evidence suggests a relationship between music and spatial-reasoning. One particular link:, the termed Mozart effect, is an enhancement in performance on spatial-reasoning tasks after listening to the ftrst movement of a sonata by Mozart. Though some studies offer additional evidence to support the Mozart effect, it is interesting that a number of studies attempting to reproduce it have failed. Accordingly, this study investigated the Mozart effect using an alternative means of assessing spatial-reasoning ability. Additionally, the music of Haydn was used in an effort to reproduce the effect. Lastly, a differentiation was made between the scores of musicians and non-musicians. No significant differences were found in scores among conditions of Mozart, Silence, or Haydn. However, a marginally significant interaction was found between musician groups and stimulus groups. Additionally, when lumped together, musicians scored higher after listening to music and non-musicians scored higher after listening to silence. The trends found in this study offer an explanation for why previous research has failed to find an enhancement, as the differences in scores between musicians and non-musicians apparently cancel out when the two groups are combined