title: Does music enhance cognitive performance in healthy older adults? The Vivaldi effect.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Controversial evidence suggests that music can enhance cognitive performance. In the present study, we examined whether listening to an excerpt of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" had a positive effect on older adults' cognitive performance in two working memory tasks.
  
  
  METHODS
  With a repeated-measures design, older adults were presented with the forward version of the digit span and phonemic fluency in classical music, white-noise and no-music conditions.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Classical music significantly increased working memory performance compared with the no-music condition. In addition, this effect did not occur with white noise.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The authors discuss this finding in terms of the arousal-and-mood hypothesis and the role of working memory resources in aging.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Chieti G.D'Annunzio and Università Telematica L. Da Vinci, Chieti, Italy. n.mammarella@unich.it
authors.forename: Nicola
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Mammarella
authors.forename: Beth
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Fairfield
authors.forename: Cesare
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Cornoldi
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory; D009146:Music