Ken doesn't mention it but isn't Rauscher's last line unnecessarily tacky for a scientific communication? Rauscher concludes, "Because some people can not get bread to rise does not negate the existence of a 'yeast effect'." This may be a great example for my Research Methods class to show that, as human beings, scientists are sometimes more than just dispassionate observers. Rick Dr. Richard L. Froman Psychology Department John Brown University Siloam Springs, AR 72761 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.jbu.edu/sbs/psych/froman.htm -----Original Message----- From: Kenneth M. Steele [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, November 12, 2000 5:55 PM To: TIPS Subject: Re: Prelude...for the 'Mozart Effect' (and Steele replies) On Sun, 12 Nov 2000 14:24:06 -0500 Ron Blue <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > http://www.mindinst.org/MIND2/papers/rauscher_reply.html > > > For those interested in this issue, here is a partial reply... Neither Chabris nor I used the term "intelligence." Chabris used "abstract reasoning" and I have used either "spatial reasoning" or "spatio-temporal reasoning" when discussing the Rauscher-Shaw theory. However Rauscher has used the term and quite recently. She presented a paper at a conference at the Univ. of Illinois in June, 1999, entitled "Music exposure and the development of spatial intelligence in children." In any case, the terminological distinction was a red herring. Following an early group of failures to produce the effect by Stough et al., Carstens et al., and Newman et al., Rauscher and Shaw (1998) wrote a paper claiming that people were using the wrong spatial reasoning task. They meant a special subclass of spatial reasoning tasks, spatio-temporal reasoning, which was exemplified by the Stanford-Binet Paper Folding & Cutting task. Unfortunately (for them) when Rauscher did the literature review, she had missed some earlier failures (Kenealy & Monsef, Weeks) which had used the PF & C task. I had seen them and realized that a series of experiments replicating their methods was needed to decipher the problem. Chabris originally used only PF & C task results in his meta-analysis but the reviewers at Nature required him to report all possibly relevant studies. Since Chabris' analysis, there have been additional published failures to produce the effect and no positive reports other than by Rauscher herself. Note that Rauscher cites several manuscripts by her as in progress but none have been published yet. (Is it churlish to object to Rauscher citing the original report as a replication?) The other studies cited by her was one by Siegel (who didn't find the effect and it is still not published), by Nantais & Schellenberg (who report that their result suggests that a Mozart effect is an artifact of preference/arousal differences), and by Wilson & Brown (who found that their control condition did best). There is a recent meta-analysis by Hetland (2000) that reports a small Mozart effect but the result is based on the inclusion of lots of *unpublished* data from Rauscher and *weightings* of published data on criteria suggested by Rauscher (such as "quality of study"). Her criticisms of my work have had to change from her standard criticisms because I followed their rules. Her criticisms of my work involve two basic complaints. First, I used random assignment of subjects to conditions. (Which she didn't use. Instead she explicitly constructed her groups to "match.") Second, it was suggested that perhaps there was some sort of subtle demand characteristics in my methodology which precluded me from finding the effect. (A nonbeliever effect?) At a conference at Harvard at which we both presented, she stated that she emphasized how important it was to listen to the music and suggested that maybe I wasn't using the proper amounts of emphasis. (I measured the effect of the music on the mood of the participants.) Some might claim that pointing to demand characteristics as the source of not finding an effect is a dangerous strategy since other people might suggest that finding the effect could be explained as being due to demand characteristics also. Both Rauscher and Shaw (in his book) have emphasized the experiment by Rauscher, Robinson, and Jens (1998) as showing demand characteristic or other negative accounts are wrong when applied to their work. Rauscher, Robinson, & Jens reported that rats which were exposed in utero and 60 days post partum to 12 hours per day repetition of the famous 10-min segment of the Mozart piano sonata showed faster acquisition of the solution of a 6-unit T-Maze, relative to those rats who had equivalent exposure to Philip Glass or white noise. Presumably, rats are immune to negative thoughts from the experimenter. As it happens, I will be presenting an analysis of that experiment next week at the Psychonomics Society meeting in New Orleans. In this case, one does not even need replication to discover fundamental objections to the report. Ken (who is salivating in anticipation of an oyster po-boy) ---------------------- Kenneth M. Steele [EMAIL PROTECTED] Associate Professor Dept. of Psychology Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA
