title: The effects of music exposure and own genre preference on conscious and unconscious cognitive processes: a pilot ERP study.
abstract: Did Beethoven and Mozart have more in common with each other than Clapton and Hendrix? The current research demonstrated the widely reported Mozart Effect as only partly significant. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 16 professional classical and rock musicians during a standard 2 stimulus visual oddball task, while listening to classical and rock music. During the oddball task participants were required to discriminate between an infrequent target stimulus randomly embedded in a train of repetitive background or standard stimuli. Consistent with previous research, the P3 and N2 ERPs were elicited in response to the infrequent target stimuli. Own genre preference resulted in a reduction in amplitude of the P3 for classical musicians exposed to classical music and rock musicians exposed to rock music. Notably, at the pre-attentive stage of processing (N2) beneficial effects of exposure to classical music were observed for both groups of musicians. These data are discussed in terms of short and long-term music benefits on both conscious and unconscious cognitive processes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Glasgow Caledonian University, 70 Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow G4 0BA, UK.
authors.forename: George N
authors.initials: GN
authors.lastname: Caldwell
authors.forename: Leigh M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Riby
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003265:Contingent Negative Variation / Q000502:physiology; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D018913:Event-Related Potentials, P300 / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology