A high school student named David Merrell did a fascinating study of the effects of listening to rock music on the performance of rats in a maze. He had three groups of rats, one raised in the presence of rock music (performed by the group Anthrax), one raised in the presence of music by Mozart, and one raised in the absence of music. These animals learned to navigate a maze before exposure to the music, and then performed over three additional weeks.
The data for this study is found in anASCII file named Anthrax.txt. (Be careful of the ascii file because subject# 11 died in Week3 and data have been input with 999 as a missing value. You will have to tell your software about this or change to some other value.) The variables in the file are, in order, Subject, Group [1 = Control, 2=Mozart, 3=Anthrax], wk1r1, wk1r2, wk1r3, wk2r1 ... wkk4r3 [4 weeks of 3 runs each], week1 week2 week3 week4 [weekly means], wt1, wt2, wt3, wt4 [weekly weights], median1--median4 [weekly medians].
Last modified 3/6/2009