Classical Music and Spatial Tasks

Paper Summary:

This essay critiques an experiment testing the use of classical music to improve the test scores of a number of spatial tasks. The paper describes the methodology of the experiment and discusses the findings, particularly that exposure to complexly-structured classical music leads to an improvement in abstract reasoning ability.

From the Paper:

"In the experiment studying music and spatial task performance, the purpose was to "demonstrate the correlation between music cognition and cognitions pertaining to abstract operations such as mathematical or spatial reasoning." The experimenter's findings were that: exposure to complexly-structured classical music leads to an improvement in abstract reasoning ability. According to the statistics, this hypothesis seems correct, but there are a number of aspects of the study which are in need of improvement. One weak area of the study is length of time the music was played for. In the study, the students listened to ten minutes of classical music, ten minutes of a relaxation tape, and ten minutes of silence, prior to performing standard IQ spatial reasoning tasks."

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