Musical experience shapes top-down auditory mechanisms: Evidence from masking and auditory attention performance

Tuning the mind: Exploring the connections between musical ability and executive functions

“…Although correlational studies such as this cannot disentangle effects of musical experience from pre-existing differences between those who do or do not pursue musical training, the specificity of the relationships observed here -where musical ability is related selectively to working memory updating and not to inhibition or switching performancesuggests that the measure of musical ability is not simply acting as a proxy for task engagement or serving only as a reflection of advantages in general intelligence (e.g., Schellenberg, 2011). However, this selectivity is surprising in light of other work finding that musicians show advantages on inhibitory control (e.g., Amer et al, 2013;Moreno et al, 2011;Strait et al, 2010).…”

“…Drawing conclusions from this past work is difficult not only because of the variety of EF components examined, but also the variety of tasks used to measure EF and the variety of criteria used to categorize participants as "musicians" or "nonmusicians". In addition, it is not yet clear if musicians show advantages only in the auditory modality (e.g., Hansen et al, 2013;Strait et al, 2010;cf. Carey et al, 2015) or if musical ability is related to performance on non-auditory EF tasks as well (e.g., Bialystok & DePape, 2009;Oechslin et al, 2013).…”

“…Musical experience might therefore lead to general inhibitory control advantages (Moreno & Farzan, 2015). In fact, adult musicians show faster responses than non-musician controls in conflict conditions of both a pitch-based auditory Stroop task and in a visual "Simon Arrows" task (Bialystok & DePape, 2009), musicians outperform non-musicians on a stop-signal task (Strait, Kraus, Parbery-Clark, & Ashley, 2010; see also Moreno, Wodniecka, Tays, Alain, & Bialystok, 2014), and professional musicians show smaller color/word Stroop interference effects than amateur musicians (Travis, Harung, & Lagrosen, 2011). These findings are not limited to college-aged participants: five-year-old children assigned to a four-week intensive computerized musical training improved more than a visual art training control group on a go/no-go task (and showed corresponding changes in electrophysiological responses; Moreno, Bialystok, Barac, Schellenberg, Cepeda, & Chau, 2011).…”

“…Relatedly, the modality-specificity or generality of these effects remains unclear. While some work suggests that musician advantages in EF (and other cognitive abilities) may be limited to auditory tasks (e.g., Hansen, Wallentin, & Vuust, 2013;Strait et al, 2010;Strait, O'Connell, Parbery-Clark, & Kraus, 2014;cf. Carey et al, 2015), other studies find effects in the visual modality as well (e.g., Bialystok & DePape, 2009;Oechslin et al, 2013), but there have been few investigations using comparable auditory and visual EF tasks.…”

Effect of mindfulness meditation on brain–computer interface performance

“…Studies also found that musicians have performed better than non-musicians on auditory processing (Chartrand & Belin, 2006;Špajdel, Jariabková, & Riečanský, 2007;Strait, Kraus, Parbery-Clark, & Ashley, 2010) and fine motor abilities (Amunts et al, 1997;Hughes & Franz, 2007;Spilka, Steele, & Penhune, 2010).…”