The Next Baby Mozart Study

The Next Baby Mozart In 1993, a study was done by a group of University of California students about the effects of music cognition on abstract operations such as mathematical and spatial reasoning. Their main question was whether or not listening to music, specifically classical, had any effect on increasing a person’s basic spatial and mathematical reasoning IQ’s. The group hypothesized that listening to classical music would develop the greatest increasing in the abstract skills compared to not listening to music at all. This study was mainly a correlational study since the group measured each person’s test results based on what they listened to, and then measured the strength of the test based off the music listened to. In the study,

They cite that music has no impact on any intelligence or cognition skills other than musical intelligence/cognition. The public made several assumptions when the research surfaced, ones that lead to the Mozart Effect theory, that children were happier, healthier and smarter when listening to classical music, which turned into adding classical music to anything children watched to make it more educational. Several meta-analysis studies were done studying the effect of music on cognition, and almost all showed little to no effect on spatial cognition. The article claimed that even though there seemed to be no real improvement in spatial reasoning from classical music, there was no harm from listening to it either, possibly giving a calming effect at

The study seemed to be logical and legitimate, and seemingly showed a connection between listening to music, specifically classical music like Mozart, and overall intelligence increases. Many variables were accounted for, several calculations and statistics were done to test the validity of the results obtained, and there were several suggestions about how the experiment could be changed and improved upon to better assess the effects of the music. Once the study was read more in-depth and the secondary article was read, ensuing impressions were that the study had missed some possible reasonings for their results and that their study seemed to be disproved by many other similar studies, specifically that the listeners experienced an enjoyment arousal effect briefly(Anderson). Also, the secondary source suggested more of a spatial reasoning improvement rather than an overall intelligence increase, which was also stated in the original study. Overall, the primary and secondary articles closely agreed, mainly about the slight increase in spatial