4. General discussion
The aim of the present study was to investigate the influence Mozart’s music has on different phases of learning – represented by Hebb’s recurrent activation phase and memory consolidation. The behavioral data support the hypothesized beneficial influence of Mozart music on both learning phases. However, the results showed that all experimental groups outperformed the controls, hence the test of the priming/consolidation dichotomy was not positive. A possible reason for this could be that the tasks used were not sensitive enough to measure the potential differences. The same seems true for the physiological measures used – no differences in EEG patterns between the control group and the two experimental groups SM and MS were observed. Only the MM respondents showed reliable physiological changes in relation to the behavioral data. One probable explanation (which was also confirmed in the second experiment) could be that the prolonged exposure of the MM respondents to music might have had a more marked and permanent influence on brain activity subserving spatio-temporal reasoning, which could be detected by the EEG methodology used.