Effects of Musical Experience

Language and music were once considered completely separate systems, located in the left and right hemispheres of the brain, respectively. However, recent evidence from neuroimaging and behavioral studies has suggested that music and language may be closely linked. For example, syntactic processing and the processing of harmony may share certain neural resources, and some aspects of speech and music may be processed by overlapping working memory systems. If such overlap does exist, early experience with music and musical performance may affect not only the cognitive skills used to process music, but also language skills. The present study tested experienced musicians and three groups of musically inexperienced subjects, gymnasts, Psychology 101 students, and video game players on digit span, word span and sequence memory span tasks. By including skilled gymnasts who began studying their craft by age six, video game players, and Psychology 101 students, we attempted to control for some of the ways skilled musicians may differ from the general population, in terms of gross motor skills and intensive experience in a highly skilled domain form an early age. We found that musicians displayed higher memory spans than the comparison groups on digit span and auditory conditions of the sequence span task, but no differences were found between the four groups on the visual condition of the sequence span task. These results provide further converging support to recent findings showing that musical experience and activity may affect verbal rehearsal, phonological coding, and the allocation of attention in sequence memory tasks.