[The influence of Mozart's and Beethoven's music on reverse mnemonic recall tasks].
The aim of this paper is to investigate one of the most well-known phenomena in the field of music  psychology: the influence of Mozart's music (Mozart effect). Today the Mozart effect is generally  related to every kind of short-term or long-term positive influence of music on men and animals.  Here  it  is examined  in  relation  to  cognitive  tasks  and par ticularly  in  relation  to  reverse mnemonic  recall tasks. Twenty-four volunteers, aged 50-55 participated in all 3 ten-minute conditions of the  experiment which were Mozart's Allegro con spirito K.448, Beethoven's Rondo-Allegro opus 61  and ten minutes of silence without any recorded acoustic stimulus. The individuals were randomly  separated in six groups. The examination material were three improvised groups of series consisted of one-digit numbers from 2 to 9 digits, which were read in a rate of one digit per second.  Results indicated that the majority of the participants did not show any increase in the number of  digits that they could recall due to the listening of Mozart's piece. Also, no statistically significant  difference was found between the three conditions associated with listening to a morphologically  similar excerpt by Beethoven. What was however found was that individuals who strongly preferred the Mozart condition scored better than the others (p=0,005). Finally, it seems that participants who had attended even basic music studies remembered more digits in all three conditions  of the experiment than the others who had never studied music before (p=0,000).
3rd Department of Neurology, University of Thessaloniki, "G. Papanikolaou" General Hospital, Thessaloniki.
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V
Giannouli
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M
Tsolaki
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P
Kargopoulos