Domain-specific and domain-general contributions to reading musical notation

Abstract

Musical practice may benefit not only domain-specific abilities, such as pitch discrimination and music performance, but also domain-general abilities, like executive functioning and memory. Behavioral and neural changes in visual processing have been associated with music-reading experience. However, it is still unclear whether there is a domain-specific visual ability to process musical notation. This study investigates the specificity of the visual skills relevant to simple decisions about musical notation. Ninety-six participants varying in music-reading experience answered a short survey to quantify experience with musical notation and completed a test battery that assessed musical notation reading fluency and accuracy at the level of individual note or note sequence. To characterize how this ability may relate to domain-general abilities, we also estimated general intelligence (as measured with the Raven's Progressive Matrices) and general object-recognition ability (as measure by a recently proposed construct o). We obtained reliable measurements on our various tasks and found evidence for a domain-specific ability of the perception of musical notation. This music-reading ability and domain-general abilities were found to contribute to performance on specific tasks differently, depending on the level of experience reading music.

Object recognition ability predicts category learning with medical images

“…One possible reason for the lack of a relationship with category learning may be the limited amount of feedback that participants received. Although tests that are used to estimate o do not use feedback, and o can predict other skills measured in tests without feedback, such as working memory judgements with musical notation (Chang & Gauthier, 2021 ) or food oddball judgements (Gauthier & Fiestan, 2023 ), the strategies and mechanisms recruited during category learning may be particularly sensitive to feedback. Early on in category learning, people tend to rely on simple rule-based judgements and then update these rules as they receive further feedback, before shifting to similarity-based exemplar retrieval as expertise develops (Johansen & Palmeri, 2002 ).…”

“…As in prior work, we used the aggregate of two object recognition tests to estimate o (e.g. Chang & Gauthier, 2021 ; Chow et al, 2022 ; Sunday et al, 2018 ). These two tests were chosen from a battery of tests that were good indicators of o in confirmatory factor models (Richler et al, 2019 ; Sunday et al, 2022 ), on the basis that they have different test constraints and use different categories of novel objects.…”

“…The o factor explains variance in scores on object recognition tests beyond that explained by intelligence and visual working memory, and it can do so for both familiar and unfamiliar object categories (Richler et al, 2017 ; Sunday et al, 2022 ). In studies that are not concerned with investigating the structure of this visual ability, or that for practical reasons cannot achieve the sample size or the number of tasks required for structural equation modelling, an aggregate approach (Rushton et al, 1983 ) to measuring object recognition ability has been used (Chang & Gauthier, 2021 ; Chow et al, 2022 ). In this approach, z -scores on two object recognition tests that differ in format and stimuli are averaged to estimate the level of the underlying o ability.…”

“…For example, one may learn to categorise a skin mole as cancerous if it is asymmetrical, but one may also rely on comparisons of the mole to remembered examples of cancerous and non-cancerous moles. o predicts performance on many visual tasks that require judgements other than individuation, such as visual search, and judgements of summary statistics for ensembles (Chang & Gauthier, 2021 ; Sunday et al, 2018 ). Given that o can predict such a wide array of visual tasks, it is reasonable to question whether o could also predict accurate categorisation in a visual domain.…”

Mini review: Individual differences and domain-general mechanisms in object recognition

“…We have used o to predict learning on a lung nodule detection task, over and above experience in that field and g (Sunday et al, 2018; see also Trueblood et al, 2018;Carrigan et al, 2020). For reading musical notation, o and g contributed differently to performance in experts vs. novices (Chang and Gauthier, 2021b), suggesting there can be a shift between domain-general and domain-specific abilities during learning. Recently, o predicted performance in food recognition tasks (Gauthier and Fiestan, 2022), and being able to control for o was critical in revealing a food-specific recognition ability.…”