The Mozart effect is a term that refers to results from 1993, which indicated that undergraduates performed better on some measures of IQ if they had heard music composed by Mozart just before taking the test. Although the original researchers speculated that there was a special link between listening to Mozart and spatial abilities, our research showed that the link is simply one example of how music can make you feel good, and that feeling good often leads to good performance on a variety of tests.
We showed that listeners perform better on a spatial test after listening to Mozart or to Schubert compared to sitting in silence, but they perform similarly after listening to Mozart or to a narrated story (Nantais & Schellenberg, 1999). We then documented that the effect was due to participants being more alert and in a better mood after listening to the music than after sitting in silence (Husain, Thompson, & Schellenberg, 2002; Thompson, Schellenberg, & Husain, 2001). Research with children showed that performance after music listening is best when the children have just heard music they like, and that the effect can lead to faster processing and greater creativity, not just better spatial skills (Schellenberg & Hallam, 2005; Schellenberg, Nakata, Hunter, & Tamoto, 2007).
Another line of our research asks how children who take music lessons differ from other children. Although we showed that music lessons causes small improvements in IQ (Schellenberg, 2004), we also documented that children who take music lessons often have much higher IQs than other children, and that they do even better in school that you would predict from their IQ scores (Corrigall, Schellenberg, & Misura, 2013; Schellenberg, 2006, 2011b), which suggests that good students are particularly likely to take music lessons. Children who take music lessons also differ from other children in terms of their personality (Corrigall et al., 2013; Corrigall & Schellenberg, 2015). Current research focuses on how language use is associated with music lessons and natural musical talent.
We are currently recruiting and testing children at the Merriam School of Music, which is the largest music school in Canada. The Merriam school offers private and group music lessons at their locations in Oakville and Vaughan. This link https://www.merriammusic.com/research/university-of-toronto/ takes you to the school.
See the Publications page to view (and see complete citations for) the journal articles referenced above.