Children's Age-Related Intellectual Strategies for Dealing With Musical and Spatial Analogical Tasks

Abstract

The authors of this study sought to determine whether there is an age-related, common level of logic underlying responses to musical and spatial analogical tasks and to characterize these levels of logic in terms of similar intellectual strategies. Children ( N = 128) ranging in age from 6.5 to 12.5 years old were individually tested using author-designed Spatial Analogy Tasks (SANTs) and Musical Analogy Tasks (MANTs). Analyses of results indicated that (a) a sequential nature exists in a child's development of musical intellectual strategies; (b) this sequential development in music seems to parallel an age-related sequence in other areas of understanding (i.e., spatial concepts); and (c) a parallel, rather than identical, sequence between musical analogical reasoning and spatial analogical reasoning may be due to the complexity of musical concepts. That is, the musical tasks may have created a conceptual “overload” for this population of subjects.