Listening to Mozart May Not Enhance Performance on the Revised Minnesota Paper Form Board Test

Abstract

Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky in 1993 found that listening to a Mozart sonata temporarily enhanced performance on the spatial reasoning task from the Stanford-Binet scale. The present study was designed to replicate those results using the Revised Minnesota Paper Form Board Test. 30 women and 21 men were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In one condition, subjects listened to a Mozart sonata for 10 min., while in the control condition subjects meditated in silence for 10 min. Immediately following these manipulations all subjects worked on the spatial task, the Revised Minnesota Paper Form Board Test, for 10 minutes. After factoring out SAT scores and gender, there was no significant difference in the mean test scores for the two groups. The results are discussed in terms of Gustafsson's 1984 factor analysis of intellectual abilities in which he identified three separate visuospatial factors. The task used here may have had a substantially different factor loading than the dependent variable used by Rauscher and associates.