Essay On The Mozart Effect

The Sound of Cognition In Edward Mjoen’s study of the concept of the Mozart Effect, its aim was to observe how the style of music played correlates with cognitive recall and reaction times. The Mozart Effect is a phenomenon researched by Rauscher et al. in 1993 that affects brain plasticity and how classical music has an effect spatial reasoning because of the composition’s complex structure. However, recent studies revolving the Mozart Effect has shown that rather than brain plasticity, the increase in spatial ability originates from the arousal of the individual that is listening to a certain style of music because of an increase of attention.
For Mjoen’s study, it builds upon this research by having three separate music conditions of Popular Radio Music (PRM), Popular Radio Music Played Classically (PRMPC), and Unfamiliar Radio Music Played Classically (URMPC). The hypothesis of his study was, “…participants will recall more words on the cognitive recall task while listening to unfamiliar radio music played classically. Participants will also record faster times on the reaction time test while unfamiliar radio music played classically is played,” (Mjoen 4). The participants
Starting with the former test, “The cognitive recall test showed subjects in the URMPC condition recalled significantly more words than subjects in the PRM and PRMPC condition,” (Mjoen 1). There was an average of about 17.76 words recalled for URMPC while PRM had 10.55 and PRMPC had 13.60 words recalled. As for the reaction time test, it shows the URMPC has the fastest average reaction time of 315.43 seconds, PRMPC with 325.77 seconds, and PRM with 331.92 seconds. Thus, the results correlate with the hypothesis because the popularity and familiarity of the popular music categories caused an increase of mind wandering which further distracted the participants unlike the unfamiliar