Abstract
Musical training (MT) is perceived as a multi-sensory program that simultaneously integrates visual, aural, oral, and kinesthetic senses. Furthermore, MT stimulates cognitive functions in a ludic way instead of tapping straight into the traditional context of school learning, including mathematics. Nevertheless, the efficacy of MT over mathematics remains understudied, especially concerning longstanding effects. For this reason, this longitudinal study explored the impact of MT on numerical cognition and abstract visual reasoning using a double-blind and quasi-experimental design. We assessed two groups of children from primary schools, namely one with developmental dyscalculia [DD; n = 22] and another comprising typically developing children [TD; n = 22], who concomitantly underwent MT. Numerical cognition measurement was carried out at four different time points: Baseline (pre-MT assessment), mid-test (after 7 weeks of MT), post-test (after 14 weeks of MT), and follow-up (10 weeks after the end of MT). Significant interactions were found between time and group for numerical cognition performance, in which the DD group showed higher scores in number comprehension, number production at mid-test, and calculation at post-test compared to baseline. A key finding was that number production, number comprehension, and calculation effects were time-resistant for the DD group since changes remained on follow-up. Moreover, no significant differences over time were found for abstract visual reasoning for both groups. In conclusion, the findings of this study showed that MT appears to be a useful tool for compensatory remediation of DD.
Highlights
Numerical cognition underlies daily-life activities and mathematical performance across our lifespan, and it has an impact on personal and professional development (Ancker and Kaufman, 2007)
The numerical-processing is divided into number comprehension, responsible for understanding the nature of numeric symbols associated with their quantities, and number production, e.g., Musical Training on Developmental Dyscalculia reading, writing, and counting numbers (McCloskey et al, 1985), and the calculation component that is related to the performance of basic mathematical operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division
We hypothesize that over the brief Musical training (MT) children with developmental dyscalculia (DD) will improve performance that concerns numerical cognition
Summary
Numerical cognition underlies daily-life activities and mathematical performance across our lifespan, and it has an impact on personal and professional development (Ancker and Kaufman, 2007). The numerical-processing is divided into number comprehension, responsible for understanding the nature of numeric symbols associated with their quantities, and number production, e.g., Musical Training on Developmental Dyscalculia reading, writing, and counting numbers (McCloskey et al, 1985), and the calculation component that is related to the performance of basic mathematical operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Dysfunction in spatial reasoning is present since quantities seem to be embodied in spatial formats, i.e., in the mental number line (Landerl, 2013) These deficits are associated with anomalies in brain functioning, for instance, some studies, comparing children with DD to typically developing control children, showed that the latter demonstrated higher activations in the intraparietal sulcus for number representations, while children with DD mostly activated medial frontal areas, revealing compensatory mechanisms (Kaufmann et al, 2011)
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