Question

A high school student named David Merrell did a study of how music affects the ability of rats to run a maze. He trained 71 rats to run a maze. Next he randomly divided the rats to three groups. Each group had 23 or 24 rats. For the next month, one group of rats listened all day to heavy metal music by the group Anthrax. One group listened all day to Mozart. One group never heard music. The rats ran the same maze three times a week for a month. The response variable is the time in seconds to complete the maze. By the end of the month he compared the average run time for each treatment group to the average run time for the control group. The Anthrax group was much slower at running the maze. The Mozart group was much faster. The differences are statistically significant at the 1% level. Run times are not heavily skewed in any group. What conclusion can we draw from these results

Answer 1

Step-by-step explanation:

Heavy Metal "music" impacts negatively the long term memory, if at least the ability to access it.

while harmonic music has no blocking effect or maybe even strengthens the long term memory and the ability to access it.

here 3 remarks.

first 2 scientifically from psychology : memory works mostly associative. that means brains do not store absolute information like a digital computer, but always in combination and association with other pieces of information. if there is nothing else to remember (like a more or less random pattern of sound effects for that the brain cannot find a rule or concept for), there are no associations with presented pieces of information, and the storage and access to it is much harder and restricted.

and - loud crashing and seemingly random noise triggers the panic mode in our brains. and panic is the mode favoring pure instinct and suppressing cognitive functions.

and finally, personally, it just confirms what I literally feel when listening to such music : it destroys at that moment any ability to keep a straight thought, prolonged exposure gives me the feeling that something gets broken inside my brain and thought processes.

I suspect that this is exactly the feeling that the fans of this kind of music are after (kind of like most drugs), but I am not surprised that there actually is something broken in the brain (again, as with drugs).