Do Rats Show a Mozart Effect?

Abstract

The "Mozart effect" is an increase in spatial reasoning scores after listening to a Mozart piano sonata. Both the production and interpretation of the effect are controversial. Many studies have failed to replicate the original effect. Other studies have explained a Mozart effect as being caused by changes in arousal or differences in preferences of the listener. F. H. Rauscher, K. D. Robinson, and J. J. Jens (1998) reported that rats learned to complete a T-maze more quickly if they had been exposed in utero and reared hearing a Mozart piano sonata. They concluded that the result indicated a direct effect of the music on brain development and contradicted competing accounts of arousal or preference. This article is an analysis of the experiment by Rauscher et al. The in utero exposure would have been ineffective because rats are born deaf. A comparison of human and rat audiograms, in the context of the frequencies produced by a piano, suggests that adult rats are deaf to most notes in the sonata. The successful performance of the Mozart group may be explained by the incomplete use of random assignment of subjects to groups and by experimenter effects in the construction of groups. The results of do not provide strong support for the existence of the Mozart effect.

Unconvincing Evidence That Rats Show a Mozart Effect

“…However, the values in Table 1 show that the proportional values remain almost constant across the various permutations. The general arguments of Steele (2003) are not affected by the change in the absolute count of notes.…”

“…The issue is whether independent laboratories, staffed by individuals without personal investment in a specific outcome, can reliably produce an effect. The Mozart effect in rats is still in need of replication and, as argued in Steele (2003), explanation.…”

Perinatal exposure to music protects spatial memory against callosal lesions

“…In contrast to other similar studies, we chose to expose rats to a wider set of musical stimuli in order to maximize their auditory enrichment, especially considering that due to their higher absolute auditory threshold, they hear about half (i.e., sounds >500 Hz, corresponding to a point between B 5 and C 5 on the keyboard) of the available piano notes in a given sonata (Steele, 2003). They are deaf to air‐borne sounds (i.e., but not bone sound conduction) until PN11, but they display cochlear microphonic responses from PN2, and auditory brainstem responses from PN7–10 (Steele, 2003). The rats in the two experimental groups (control + music, and callosotomy + music) were exposed to this music each night, between PN2 and PN32 (see Fig.…”

“…A playlist that included 42 piano compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (see Supplementary Material) was continuously played (65-75 dB) for 12 h, between 19:00 and 07:00. In contrast to other similar studies, we chose to expose rats to a wider set of musical stimuli in order to maximize their auditory enrichment, especially considering that due to their higher absolute auditory threshold, they hear about half (i.e., sounds >500 Hz, corresponding to a point between B 5 and C 5 on the keyboard) of the available piano notes in a given sonata (Steele, 2003). They are deaf to air-borne sounds (i.e., but not bone sound conduction) until PN11, but they display cochlear microphonic responses from PN2, and auditory brainstem responses from PN7-10 (Steele, 2003).…”

Neural Mechanism for Spatial Memory Exposed to Mozart Music

“…For the water maze experiment, the escape latency in hidden terrace hunting experiment is analyzed using the repetitive measurement and variance analysis in the generalized linear model (Steele, 2003). Spatial search experiment uses one-way analysis of variance to compare the differences in swimming time between the four groups of rats in the four quadrants.…”