The "Mozart effect" is the tendency to score higher on spatiotemporal IQ 
subscales following exposure to complex music such as Mozart's Sonata K.448. 
This phenomenon was investigated in 20 musicians and 20 nonmusicians. The trion 
model predicts increased synchrony between musical and spatiotemporal centres in 
the right cerebral hemisphere. Since increased left-hemispheric involvement in 
music processing occurs as a result of music training, predictions deriving from 
the possibility of increased synchrony with left-hemispheric areas in musicians 
were tested. These included improved performance on language as well as 
spatiotemporal tasks. Spatiotemporal, synonym generation, and rhyming word 
generation tasks were employed as was the Mozart Sonata K.448. A Mozart effect 
was demonstrated on the spatiotemporal task, and the facilitatory effect of 
exposure to Mozart was greater for the nonmusician group. This finding adds to 
the robustness of the Mozart effect since novel tasks were used. No Mozart 
effect was found for either group on the verbal tasks, although the musicians 
scored higher on rhyming word generation. This new finding adds to the number of 
nonmusical tasks apparently showing long-term benefits from music training. 
However, no systematic link was found between performance on any task and number 
of years spent in music training. The failure to induce a Mozart effect in the 
musician group on verbal tasks, as well as that group's limited facilitation on 
spatiotemporal tasks, may be associated with either a ceiling effect due to the 
long-term effects of music training or from methodological factors. Both 
possibilities are discussed.