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Abstract
In this paper, we investigated the existence of the temporal component of Mozart effect, analyzed the influence of arousal or mood changing to attentional blink when listening to Mozart Sonata (K.448 D Major). We manipulated the tempo and the mode of Mozart Sonata to check if these two factors of music could affect participant's temporal attention in two experiments. According to the experiment results, the temporal component of Mozart effect does not general exist. Mozart Sonata might possibly induce listener's arousal or mood shifting, but could not induce any temporal attention improvement significantly.
Key Words: Mozart effect, Attentional blink, arousal, mood
1. Introduction
A set of research results indicate that listening to Mozart's music may induce a short-term improvement on the performance of certain kinds of mental tasks. Mozart effect was reported firstly by Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky[I] who investigated the effect of listening to music by Mozart on spatial reasoning. In their study, the subjects got 8 to 9 points improvement in spatial-temporal tasks after they listened to 10 min Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K.448). However, among the large number of attempts trying to replicate the findings, some have, indeed, reproduced die findings, while otiiers failed to show a significant effect of listening to Mozart's music. Nonetheless, despite critical discussions, the more widely accepted account to explain those failures of replication is that Mozart's music may induce the change of listener's arousal or mood rather than their spatial-reasoning ability, and that change may influence the spatial reasoning processing. It is well know that arousal and mood influence cognition. According to the arousal-mood hypothesis, listening to music affects arousal and mood, which then influence performance on various cognitive skills or mental function (Gabrielsson, 2001; Krumhansl, 1997; Peretz, 2001a; Schmidt & Trainor, 2001; Sloboda & Justin, 2001; Thayer & Levenson, 1983) [2-7].' Several studies supported the similar results that participants who listened to fast major music had better performance in tests than those who listened to slow minor music. In one study, researchers examined die effects of Musical Tempo and Mode on arousal, mood, and spatial abilities. In their experiments, participants were asked to do the paper-folding-and-cutting (PF&C) task while listening to one of four versions of the Mozart sonata...