The Mozart effect may only be demonstrable in nonmusicians

The "Mozart effect" is the tendency to score higher on spatiotemporal IQ subscales following exposure to complex music such as Mozart's Sonata K.448. This phenomenon was investigated in 20 musicians and 20 nonmusicians. The trion model predicts increased synchrony between musical and spatiotemporal centres in the right cerebral hemisphere. Since increased left-hemispheric involvement in music processing occurs as a result of music training, predictions deriving from the possibility of increased synchrony with left-hemispheric areas in musicians were tested. These included improved performance on language as well as spatiotemporal tasks. Spatiotemporal, synonym generation, and rhyming word generation tasks were employed as was the Mozart's Sonata K.448. A Mozart effect was demonstrated on the spatiotemporal task, and the facilitatory effect of exposure to Mozart was greater for the non-musician group. This finding adds to the robustness of the Mozart effect since novel tasks were used. No Mozart effect was found for either group on the verbal tasks, although the musicians scored higher on rhyming word generation. This new finding adds to the number of nonmusical tasks apparently showing long-term benefits from music training. However, no systematic link was found between performance on any task and number of years spent in music training. The failure to induce a Mozart effect in the musician group on verbal tasks, as well as that group's limited facilitation on spatiotemporal tasks, may be associated with either a ceiling effect due to the long-term effects of music training or from methodological factors. Both possibilities are discussed.