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.
Introduction
Music training involves many neurocognitive systems, like audition, vision, motor control and their integration. Over the last 20 years, there has been a considerable increase of interest in the relationship between such training and the maturation of cognitive skills.
Effect of Music Learning on Cognitive Development in Children
There is also a wealth of studies suggesting that music training may have a sizeable effect on cognitive maturation during childhood; it remains to be established at what stage of the development this might be so, whether music affects cognition in a broad sense or whether the effect is specific for cognitive skills that one may readily associate with music (e.g., auditory processing).
Schellenberg (2004) investigated whether music training has an impact on the IQ in a wide sample of children randomly assigned to a music training group, to an art training group or to the control group: music training had a boosting effect on the IQ, while training in arts was more effective on social behavior. Two further studies by Schellenberg (2006, 2011) confirmed an association between IQ and the duration of music training.
The IQ is a lumped measure of several functions and the observation of superior IQs in musically trained subjects does not demonstrate per se a generalized cognitive boosting effect. Other studies have tried to pinpoint the cognitive domains on which music training might have an effect on cognitive development. Not surprisingly, positive effects were found on cognitive abilities that have a close relationship with music, for example auditory processing (Trainor et al., 2003), phonological awareness (Moreno et al., 2011b; Francois et al., 2013) prosody (Thompson et al., 2004). It has to be noted that phonological and prosodic skills represent higher order auditory skills.
However, as for adults, other studies have found effects of music training on domains that are not specifically “musical” in any obvious sense, like learning skills and memory: children trained with music lessons have better performance in verbal memory tasks (Ho et al., 2003; Roden et al., 2012), verbal intelligence (Moreno et al., 2011a), language processing (see Patel, 2003, 2011) visuo-spatial skills (Rauscher et al., 1997), arithmetic (see Vaughn, 2000) and reading skills (Corrigall and Trainor, 2011; Tierney and Kraus, 2013; Slater et al., 2014). Accordingly, these developmental results seem to support, like the data from adults, a generalized “boosting effect hypothesis” of music on cognition.
Yet, a few issues remain open with this literature. For example, it is still possible that some of the effects that music seems to have on non-music-related skills may still be mediated by cognitive functions that it is not too hard to associate with music. One obvious example is the one of music and reading. According to a recent meta-analysis (Gordon et al., 2015), music training would positively affect reading skills via its effects on phonological skills2. A similar caveat is supported also by the results of musically-based treatments on children with learning difficulty and disabilities (Overy, 2003; Register et al., 2007; Cogo-Moreira et al., 2012; Flaugnacco et al., 2015) in which children with reading deficits showed a post-treatment improvement not only in reading tasks, but also in phonological tasks. The data on the visuospatial skills, and particularly on visual memory, are not clear either. As pointed out by Roden et al. (2012), the research performed in school contexts has provided non-conclusive or conflicting results: the visuospatial advantage reported by Gardiner et al. (1996), could be due to the fact that in that study children were trained both in music and visual arts making it impossible to distinguish whether any advantage was due to music training, to visual art training or to their combination. In the same vein, another study focused on music training at school (Rickard et al., 2010) reported an effect on verbal memory, even though this may not be a long-lasting one: on the other hand, the same study could not find a sizeable effects of music training on visual memory skills (Roden et al., 2012).
Longitudinal studies designed to document brain morphometry changes associated with music training (e.g., Hyde et al., 2009; Habibi et al., 2018) revealed signs of brain plasticity together with group specific changes in behavioral performance, yet only for domains strictly related to music training (e.g., audition, motor skills). A further evidence along these lines comes from brain morphometry studies that found a significantly larger corpus callosum, a marker of more efficient inter-hemispheric traffic, in people who started a music training before 7 years of age (see Schlaug, 2015 for a review).
However, as discussed below, all the considerations about the effects of music training, with the exception perhaps of those based on the few available longitudinal studies3, suffer of a major lingering limitation: the inability to distinguish causes and effects, to determine in a conclusive manner whether the cognitive advantage seen in musically-trained children or in adults is a genuine effect of the training, whether it is a specific one or whether it is a spurious effect due to the fact that a future musician may decide to join an educational program with intensive music training because of his predispositions. If the latter hypothesis were correct, it would be tempting to concur with Schellenberg and his statement that “music training is better suited for studying pre-existing differences in terms of brain and cognitive development rather than training specific plasticity” (Schellenberg, 2011, p. 297).
Aim of the Study
As mentioned, one main limitation of previous literature is that the empirical observations made and the implications inferred were based primarily on retrospective or cross-sectional studies. Yet, the same issues could be better addressed and discussed using carefully designed longitudinal prospective studies (Schellenberg, 2004, 2006, 2011; Corrigall and Trainor, 2011; Moreno et al., 2011a; Tierney and Kraus, 2014) where one takes into account both the family’s cultural/socioeconomic status, the cognitive skills of the kids under examination and the school teaching content. One such approach may better discriminate the contribution of natural and nurture related factors (Sameroff, 2010) in this area of cognitive developmental psychology.
This is what we tried to achieve with the present study. In the light of these considerations, and with the aim of making a further step toward a better understanding on whether music may have a specific boosting effect on cognitive functions, we designed a longitudinal quasi-experimental4 study based on the assessment of cognitive development in pre-adolescents with and without previous music experience who attended either a music or a standard curriculum.
The decision to concentrate our efforts on pre-adolescents over their attendance to the middle school was motivated by pragmatic reasons: the time of the middle school is the only occasion when the Italian education system offers any programed instrumental music training, i.e., 2 h per week in canonical curricula or 5 h per week, including 2 h of music in ensemble, for the music curricula in the middle school where our study was based5.
Participants in the experimental group were about to start a music curriculum in middle school and were compared to their classmates who attended a standard curriculum. This comparison allowed us to keep the possible confounders under control and to isolate, as much as possible, the effect of more intensive music training. Sampling the children by their choice to attend either the music or the standard curriculum and by their previous music training allowed us to assess their starting features and the effect of music training on a vast pool of cognitive dimensions in the same group of participants.
In what follows we report a longitudinal study based on cognitive tests on preadolescent students of the Negri-Calasanzio Middle School, located in the San Siro district of Milan (Italy). We assessed non-verbal reasoning, language, reading, memory, numerical, and visuo-spatial skills.
As some students had previous music experiences, i.e., private lessons or music laboratory in which they played an instrument during primary school for at least one continuative year, we also took into account this additional variable, grouping the sample by the school curriculum and by the presence or absence of previous music experience. Finally, in our results we also considered the possible influence of parents’ education.
In sum, in this longitudinal study we explored whether the kids who decided to attend the music curriculum show any cognitive advantage with respect to the standard group, on the one hand, and whether the intensive music training can moderate the developmental trajectories of these groups. We expected that the previous musical experience and perhaps the familial socio-cultural status could predict an overall better cognitive performance: yet, it remained a matter of empirical evaluation whether music training could have a further boosting effect in promoting cognitive maturation showing a group-by-time interaction effect and whether this was a generalized one or a specific one.
Materials and Methods
Participants
All the participants were recruited during the school years 2014/2015, 2015/2016, and 2016/2017 at the Negri-Calasanzio Middle School of San Siro, Milan.
Students were enrolled in the study after obtaining written informed consent from the parents.
During the 3 years of study, a total of 351 students belonging to all classes of the institute were tested. To avoid potential confounds, in the following analyses we included only participants who never failed their finals, who did not received a prior diagnosis of a learning disability, who underwent the first evaluation at 6th grade, corresponding to the first year of middle school in Italy, and who participated in the study in both the 6th and the 7th grade (Table 1). None of the participants had a medical history of neurological, developmental or psychiatric disorders. After this selection, we obtained a sample of 128 students (56 males and 72 females, see Table 1 for more details).
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