Mozart’s sonata K.448 as a paradigm in cognitive neuroscience: evidence and hegemony

Mozart’s sonata for two pianos in D major, K.448, has become a de facto auditory stimulus in research linking music to cognition and brain function. This narrative critical review synthesizes three decades of peer reviewed human, clinical, and animal studies, organizing findings by task domain (attention, working memory), neural endpoints (EEG/qEEG, seizure metrics), and protocol choices (movement/segment, dose, delivery chain, control design). Across human studies, effects on visuospatial and memory performance and electrocortical indices are heterogeneous and often moderated by arousal, preference, and listening context; in epilepsy, daily listening can reduce interictal activity in some paradigms. Animal evidence supports temporal specificity: intact rhythmic structure tends to facilitate learning and plasticity markers, whereas time reversed or pitch only variants attenuate or abolish benefits; rhythm only variants sometimes preserve gains. Recurrent limitations include underspecified stimuli, small homogeneous samples, scarce preregistration, limited acoustic matching (e.g., loudness/spectral controls), and few comparisons with structurally similar repertoire. We propose a compact reporting checklist (stimulus specification, acoustic/loudness matching, delivery calibration, dose, randomization/blinding, and data sharing) and outline falsifiable predictions for CABN aligned designs that manipulate rhythm, tonality, and temporal direction while stratifying by movement and listener characteristics. Overall, K.448 remains a useful, historically rich paradigm, but its evidentiary status hinges on explicit boundary conditions and transparent design rather than authorial identity.