TORONTO, June 28, 2001 -- New research on the"Mozart Effect", conducted by York University Psychology Prof. William F. Thompson, shows no direct link between listening to the music of Mozart and human performance on tests of spatial ability. His report, Arousal, Mood, and the Mozart Effect, co-authored with York graduate student Gabriela Husain and Prof. E. Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto, is published in the latest issue of the American Psychological Society journal Psychological Science .

"Our findings debunk the popular myth that Mozart in particular makes you smart," says Thompson. "Instead, the enhancement of spatial ability is merely related to changes in mood and arousal induced by music, which has a strong effect on these states, but then, so do many other things, such as chocolate, caffeine, an engaging story, or whatever suits your fancy."

Spatial reasoning tasks involve the ability to imagine objects in space and how they change in sequence, such as thinking three or four moves ahead in a chess game. Authors of the Mozart Effect -- Rauscher, Shaw and Ky -- reported in Nature in 1993 that college students perform better on standardized tests of spatial ability after listening to10 minutes of a Mozart sonata than they do after listening to relaxation instructions or sitting in silence. They asserted that there was a causal link between music and spatial reasoning specific to the complex patterns of Mozart, which they said stimulated the same neural circuits of the brain used in complicated visual-spatial tasks.

"There is no such magical link," says Thompson, adding that it is simply an effect of enhanced arousal and positive mood. "Such effects are well-established. Very high or low levels of anxiety or arousal inhibit performance on cognitive tasks, whereas moderate levels facilitate performance. Moreover, negative moods and boredom can produce deficits in performance and learning, whereas positive moods can lead to improved performance on various cognitive and problem-solving tasks," the authors say in their report. Their study asked participants to perform tasks of spatial ability after sitting in silence and after listening to music -- either a Mozart sonata, which is a lively piece of music, or an Albinoni adagio, which is a slow sad piece. They found performance on the spatial task better following the music than the silence, but only for the participants who heard Mozart. However, additional statistical analyses indicated that the effect was dependent on the level of mood and arousal of the listeners, such that, if mood and arousal were the same for the silence and music conditions, listening to Mozart would have no effect on spatial ability.

Thompson says the original studies done by Rauscher, Shaw and Ky and subsequent testing have confused differences in listening condition with differences in arousal and mood. "These studies did not include appropriate control conditions and were therefore based on poor science," he says. "In sum, claims that brief exposure to music leads to short-term enhancement of nonmusical skills are misleading," say the authors in their report. "Rather, the Mozart effect can be explained simply: Enjoyable stimuli induce positive affect and heightened levels of arousal, which lead to modest improvements in performance on a variety of tasks."

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Susan Bigelow Media Relations York University  (416) 736-2100, ext. 22091 sbigelow@yorku.ca

Bill Thompson Chair, Department of Psychology Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies, York University 416-736-5202 billt@yorku.ca

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