Learning to play a musical instrument in the middle school is associated with superior audiovisual working memory and fluid intelligence: A cross-sectional behavioral study

Abstract

Music training, in all its forms, is known to have an impact on behavior both in childhood and even in aging. In the delicate life period of transition from childhood to adulthood, music training might have a special role for behavioral and cognitive maturation. Among the several kinds of music training programs implemented in the educational communities, we focused on instrumental training incorporated in the public middle school curriculum in Italy that includes both individual, group and collective (orchestral) lessons several times a week. At three middle schools, we tested 285 preadolescent children (aged 10–14 years) with a test and questionnaire battery including adaptive tests for visuo-spatial working memory skills (with the Jack and Jill test), fluid intelligence (with a matrix reasoning test) and music-related perceptual and memory abilities (with listening tests). Of these children, 163 belonged to a music curriculum within the school and 122 to a standard curriculum. Significant differences between students of the music and standard curricula were found in both perceptual and cognitive domains, even when controlling for pre-existing individual differences in musical sophistication. The music children attending the third and last grade of middle school had better performance and showed the largest advantage compared to the control group on both audiovisual working memory and fluid intelligence. Furthermore, some gender differences were found for several tests and across groups in favor of females. The present results indicate that learning to play a musical instrument as part of the middle school curriculum represents a resource for preadolescent education. Even though the current evidence is not sufficient to establish the causality of the found effects, it can still guide future research evaluation with longitudinal data.

The association between music training and executive function in 6–7-year-old children

“…The most positive findings were observed for inhibitory control (Bolduc et al, 2021;Degé and Frischen, 2022;Rodriguez-Gomez and Talero-Gutiérrez, 2022;Schellenberg and Lima, 2024). The association between music training and working memory (both verbal and visual) has been shown predominantly in studies with school-aged rather than preschool-aged children (Bergman Nutley et al, 2014;Kausel et al, 2020;Nie et al, 2022;Vuust et al, 2022). We found only two studies where music training has been shown to influence the development of cognitive flexibility in preschoolers (Shen et al, 2019;Ilari et al, 2021).…”

“The two voices,” or more? Music and gender from myth and conquests to the neurosciences

“…Another recent article by Lippolis et al, (2022) includes an updated bibliography on the subject of possible transfer to near‐ and far‐abilities and examines the influence of training in instrumental music on working memory and fluid intelligence, thanks to a methodology apt at being carried out in the environment of public education (for a previous investigation in the same context, see Carioti et al, 2019). A cohort of 285 children aged 10 to 14 years was tested with a battery of tests including Jack&Jill, matrix reasoning, and listening tasks.…”

Music@Home - Retrospective: A New Measure to Retrospectively Assess Childhood Home Musical Environments

“…Though there is debate about whether and how musical training transfers to skills in other domains (see Sala &Gobet, 2020 andBigand &Tillman, 2022), converging evidence from several longitudinal studies, such as the LongGold project (https://longgold.org/; Müllensiefen et al, 2022;Müllensiefen et al, 2015), suggests that musical training may benefit cognitive abilities throughout middle childhood and into adolescence (for a meta-analysis, see Román-Caballero et al, 2022). Specifically, musical training during this window leads to improvements in inhibitory control (Hennesy et al, 2019) and working memory (Lippolis et al, 2022), as well as greater activation of brain areas supporting inhibition (Sachs et al, 2017) and brain structure volumes of auditory and motor areas (Hyde et al, 2009). Moreover, s Indeed, studies have shown the immediate importance of musical engagement in the home in developmental samples, finding positive impacts on language (Papadimitriou et al, 2021) and auditory perception (for a review, see Putkinen et al, 2013).…”