Effect Of Mozart Music On Child Spatio-Temporal Reasoning Ability And Its Brain Mechanism

Music has a significant promoting effect on child development. Since the20th century, more and more researchers have studied the relationship between music and brain functions."Mozart effect" makes Mozart music a popular object of study. Since1993, researches on the "Mozart effect" have appeared one after another, but the behavioral results were varied. Whether "Mozart Effect" exists or not has been a controversial issue among scholars. The past researches on "Mozart Effect" can be divided into behavioral research, cognitive neuroscience research, treatment of clinical diseases by Mozart music and the mechanism of "Mozart effect".At present, there isn’t a unanimous conclusion about "Mozart effect" in behavioral research. But conclusions in cognitive neuroscience have been consistent. It was found that Mozart music significantly activated related areas of brain, increased the synchronization between different brain regions. Mozart music was successfully applied in clinical disease treatment, such as epilepsy. Mozart music was found to significantly reduce epileptic seizure in patients with epilepsy. There are different interpretations about the mechanism of "Mozart effect", mainly including "direct triggering theory" and "indirect preference-arouse-mood theory". Problems also existed in previous studies:(1) lack of integrity in the research methods;(2) lack of cognitive neuroscience researches with child subjects;(3) lack of systematic experimental design to verify the hypotheses about generation of "Mozart effect".To explore the effect of Mozart music on preschoolers’ spatio-temporal reasoning ability and study the characteristics about the music that generate "Mozart effect" and the brain mechanism of "Mozart effect", this research integrated behavioral, EEG and fNIRS techniques. Our research carried out with three experiments.-(1) Using behavioral method to study influence of Mozart music on preschoolers’ spatio-temporal reasoning ability;(2) Using EEG technique to explore influence of Mozart music on preschoolers’s EEG power spectrum and gravity frequency during spatio-temporal reasoning test;(3) Using fNIRS technique to investigate the influence of Mozart music on preschoolers’oxyhemoglobin in frontal lobe during spatio-temporal reasoning test. Finally, behavioral, EEG and fNIRS results were combined to explore the characteristics of music that generate "Mozart effect". The results showed:1. Mozart music significantly improved girls’ ability of spatio-temporal reasoning, while this effect was not found in boys.2. Mozart music significantly increased preschoolers’ β1、β2and β total band power spectrum and gravity frequency, and significantly reduced preschoolers’δ and θ band power spectrum during spatio-temporal reasoning test.3. Mozart music significantly increased preschoolers’ frontal oxyhemoglobin during spatio-temporal reasoning test. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was more strongly activated while Mozart music was played than other types of music.4. Bach’s music was found to have similar brain activation patterns with Mozart music, and it improved preschoolers’ ability of spatio-temporal reasoning though the effect was not significant. Difference in brain’s activation patterns between "The Cat and the Mouse" and Mozart music was significant. And "The Cat and the Mouse " had no effect on the preschoolers’ ability of spatio-temporal reasoning.5. In summary, the generation of "Mozart Effect" was based on the characteristics of the music itself, rather than the music’s arousal and mood. It provided experimental evidence for the "direct triggering theory".