Abstract
It is widely believed that intensive music training can boost cognitive and visuo-motor skills. However, this evidence is primarily based on retrospective studies; this makes it difficult to determine whether a cognitive advantage is caused by the intensive music training, or it is instead a factor influencing the choice of starting a music curriculum. To address these issues in a highly ecological setting, we tested longitudinally 128 students of a Middle School in Milan, at the beginning of the first class and, 1 year later, at the beginning of the second class. 72 students belonged to a Music curriculum (30 with previous music experience and 42 without) and 56 belonged to a Standard curriculum (44 with prior music experience and 12 without). Using a Principal Component Analysis, all the cognitive measures were grouped in four high-order factors, reflecting (a) General Cognitive Abilities, (b) Speed of Linguistic Elaboration, (c) Accuracy in Reading and Memory tests, and (d) Visuospatial and numerical skills. The longitudinal comparison of the four groups of students revealed that students from the Music curriculum had better performance in tests tackling General Cognitive Abilities, Visuospatial skills, and Accuracy in Reading and Memory tests. However, there were no significant curriculum-by-time interactions. Finally, the decision to have a musical experience before entering middle school was more likely to occur when the cultural background of the families was a high one. We conclude that a combination of family-related variables, early music experience, and pre-existent cognitive make-up is a likely explanation for the decision to enter a music curriculum at middle school.
Highlights
Music training involves many neurocognitive systems, like audition, vision, motor control and their integration
Besides the clear evidence related to auditory processes (Schön et al, 2004; Schellenberg and Moreno, 2010; Habibi et al, 2016), one of the most recurrent results for non-musical cognitive skills is the one of verbal abilities and, verbal working memory (Franklin et al, 2008; Jakobson et al, 2008; Tierney et al, 2008; George and Coch, 2011): musicians achieve a superior performance in tasks where the subvocal rehearsal component of working memory is important (Franklin et al, 2008; Talamini et al, 2016)
There is a long tradition of studies assessing whether music training has an effect on the development of cognitive skills: the issue has been evaluated primarily by searching for differences between musicians and non-musicians (Brochard et al, 2004; Franklin et al, 2008; Jakobson et al, 2008; Tierney et al, 2008; Groussard et al, 2010; George and Coch, 2011)
Summary
Music training involves many neurocognitive systems, like audition, vision, motor control and their integration. Many studies have shown that professional instrumental players and even amateur players outperform non-musicians in cognitive domains related to music and auditory skills (Schön et al, 2004; Kraus and Chandrasekaran, 2010; Strait et al, 2010; Pantev and Herholz, 2011) and language processing, both at the level of phonetics (Alexander et al, 2005; Marques et al, 2007; Jäncke, 2012; Kühnis et al, 2013; Elmer et al, 2017) and prosody (Thompson et al, 2004; Lima and Castro, 2011; Park et al, 2015). This has been shown by Franklin et al (2008) who found that the musicians’ advantage in a working memory task was lost during articulatory suppression; this supports the idea that a more efficient subvocal rehearsal is the underlying factor for the outstanding memory performance observed in musicians
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