Frances H. Rauscher

Music training causes long-term enhancement of preschool children’s spatial–temporal reasoning

Predictions from a structured cortical model led us to test the hypothesis that music training enhances young childrens spatial-temporal reasoning. Seventy-eight preschool children participated in this study. Thirty-four children received private piano keyboard lessons, 20 children received private computer lessons, and 24 children provided other controls. Four standard, age-calibrated, spatial reasoning tests were given before and after training; one test assessed spatial-temporal reasoning and three tests assessed spatial recognition. Significant improvement on the spatial-temporal test was found for the keyboard group only. No group improved significantly on the spatial recognition tests. The magnitude of the spatial-temporal improvement from keyboard training was greater than one standard deviation of the standardized test and lasted at least one day, a duration traditionally classified as long term. This represents an increase in time by a factor of over 100 compared to a previous study in which listening to a Mozart piano sonata primed spatial-temporal reasoning in college students. This suggests that music training produces long-term modifications in underlying neural circuitry in regions not primarily concerned with music and might be investigated using EEG. We propose that an improvement of the magnitude reported may enhance the learning of standard curricula, such as mathematics and science, that draw heavily upon spatial-temporal reasoning.

Gesture, Speech, and Lexical Access: The Role of Lexical Movements in Speech Production

In a within-subjects design that varied whether speakers were allowed to gesture and the difficulty of lexical access, speakers were videotaped as they described animated action cartoons to a listener When speakers were permitted to gesture, they gestured more often during phrases with spatial content than during phrases with other content Speech with spatial content was less fluent when speakers could not gesture than when they could gesture, speech with nonspatial content was not affected by gesture condition Preventing gesturing increased the relative frequency of nonjuncture filled pauses in speech with spatial content, but not in speech with other content Overall, the effects of preventing speakers from gesturing resembled those of increasing the difficulty of lexical access by other means, except that the effects of gesture restriction were specific to speech with spatial content The findings support the hypothesis that gestural accompaniments to spontaneous speech can facilitate access to the mental lexicon

Classroom keyboard instruction improves kindergarten children’s spatial-temporal performance: A field experiment

Abstract The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of classroom music instruction featuring the keyboard on the spatial-temporal reasoning of kindergarten children. Sixty-two kindergartners were assigned to one of two conditions, keyboard or no music. All children were pretested with two spatial-temporal tasks and one pictorial memory task. The keyboard group was provided with 20-min lessons two times per week in groups of approximately 10 children. Children were then retested at two 4-month intervals. The keyboard group scored significantly higher than the no music group on both spatial-temporal tasks after 4 months of lessons, a difference that was greater in magnitude after 8 months of lessons. Pictorial memory did not differ for the two groups after the lessons. These data support studies that found similar skills enhancements in preschool children, despite vast differences in the setting in which the instruction occurred. The results have strong implications for school administrators and educators.

Improved maze learning through early music exposure in rats

Rats were exposed in utero plus 60 days post-partum to either complex music (Mozart Sonata (k. 448)), minimalist music (a Philip Glass composition), white noise or silence, and were then tested for five days, three trials per day, in a multiple T-maze. By Day 3, the rats exposed to the Mozart work completed the maze more rapidly and with fewer errors than the rats assigned to the other groups. The difference increased in magnitude through Day 5. This suggests that repeated exposure to complex music induces improved spatial-temporal learning in rats, resembling results found in humans. Taken together with studies of enrichment-induced neural plasticity, these results suggest a similar neurophysiological mechanism for the effects of music on spatial learning in rats and humans.

Mozart and the Mind: Factual and Fictional Effects of Musical Enrichment

Publisher Summary The “Mozart effect” refers to the finding that college students who listened to the first 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata (K.448) scored higher on a spatial-temporal reasoning task immediately afterward—an effect that lasted approximately 10 minutes. This chapter presents the school district of Kettle-Moraine study. Children from four kindergarten classrooms at two Wisconsin public elementary schools in the school district of Kettle-Moraine participated. Some children received piano keyboard instruction (keyboard group) and others received no special training (no music group). The study began by pretesting all the children using two spatial-temporal tasks, a puzzle-solving task, a block-building task, and one pictorial memory task. Children were posttested twice, once following 4 months of lessons and a second time following 8 months. Results showed that young children who were provided with music instruction scored higher on spatial-temporal tasks compared with children who did not receive the instruction. The effect was significant after 4 months of instruction. No enhancement was found for a nonspatial task: pictorial memory. However, when the music instruction was terminated the childrens scores began to decrease. The children who received instruction over the entire 4 years of the study continued to score higher on the spatial-temporal tasks. The effects of music instruction on spatial-temporal abilities may be explained by two types of theories. Neuroscientific theories assert that music instruction induces physiological changes in brain structure that consequently affect spatial-temporal processing. Transfer theories, on the other hand, suggest that playing a musical instrument and performing a spatial-temporal task require similar cognitive skills, and thus the skills involved in making music may transfer to spatial-temporal task performance.

The Vocabularies of Academia

It has been demonstrated that humanists are far more likely to use filled pauses (“uh,” “ah,” or “um”) during their lectures than are social or natural scientists This finding has been interpreted in terms of the hypothesis that filled pauses indicate time out while the speaker searches for the next word or phrase Based on the assumption that the more options at a choice point, the more likely a speaker will say “uh,” it is hypothesized that the humanities are characterized by richer vocabularies (i e, more synonyms) than are the sciences An analysis of the number of different words used in lectures and in professional publications indicates that this is indeed the case Scientists consistently use fewer different words than do humanists Further, the number of different words correlates positively with the frequency of saying “uh” during lectures These findings are not restricted to academics, for in newspaper accounts, journalists use fewer different words in stories about science than in stories about the arts

reply: Prelude or requiem for the ‘Mozart effect’?

Rauscher replies — Our results on the effects of listening to Mozarts Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major K. 448 on spatial-temporal task performance, have generated much interest but several misconceptions, many of which are reflected in attempts to replicate the research. The comments by Chabris and Steele et al. echo the most common of these: that listening to Mozart enhances intelligence. We made no such claim. The effect is limited to spatial-temporal tasks involving mental imagery and temporal ordering.

Music choice as a sadness regulation strategy for resolved versus unresolved sad events

This research examined individuals’ preference for happy music when dealing with resolved versus unresolved sad events. In experiment 1 (N = 49), participants dealing with unresolved sad events were more likely to select music that was happy, exciting, upbeat, and active than those dealing with resolved sad events. Unresolved sadness participants also wanted to listen to music that was significantly happier, more exciting, more upbeat, and more active than the music selected by the resolved sadness participants. In experiment 2 (N = 79), we employed a ‘mood-freeze’ procedure to investigate whether participants in the unresolved sadness condition were motivated to select happy music in order to cope with their unresolved sad events. Specifically, we tested whether these individuals would still be motivated to select happy music if they were led to believe they could not regulate their feelings of sadness. As predicted, participants whose sadness was ostensibly frozen (unresolved/mood-freeze condition) and participants in resolved sadness condition were significantly less likely to select happy music, and wanted to listen to music that was less happy compared to those in the unresolved/control condition. These findings suggest that choice of happy music by the individuals dealing with unresolved sad events is motivated.

Prelude or requiem for the ‘Mozart effect’?: reply

Rauscher replies — Our results on the effects of listening to Mozarts Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major K. 448 on spatial-temporal task performance, have generated much interest but several misconceptions, many of which are reflected in attempts to replicate the research. The comments by Chabris and Steele et al. echo the most common of these: that listening to Mozart enhances intelligence. We made no such claim. The effect is limited to spatial-temporal tasks involving mental imagery and temporal ordering.

Shared Processing of Language and Music

The present study sought to explore whether musical information is processed by the phonological loop component of the working memory model of immediate memory. Original instantiations of this model primarily focused on the processing of linguistic information. However, the model was less clear about how acoustic information lacking phonological qualities is actively processed. Although previous research has generally supported shared processing of phonological and musical information, these studies were limited as a result of a number of methodological concerns (e.g., the use of simple tones as musical stimuli). In order to further investigate this issue, an auditory interference task was employed. Specifically, participants heard an initial stimulus (musical or linguistic) followed by an intervening stimulus (musical, linguistic, or silence) and were then asked to indicate whether a final test stimulus was the same as or different from the initial stimulus. Results indicated that mismatched interference conditions (i.e., musical – linguistic; linguistic – musical) resulted in greater interference than silence conditions, with matched interference conditions producing the greatest interference. Overall, these results suggest that processing of linguistic and musical information draws on at least some of the same cognitive resources.