Cognitive Effects of Music and Dance Training in Children

The idea that learning music can make a child smarter has gained considerable attention from parents, educators, and policymakers. Intuitively, learning to play an instrument is mentally challenging and is thought to generalize to nonmusic improvements. This claim offers promise in using music to enhance mental performance, but before it can be applied to areas such as education and cognitive remediation, the reliability of musical effects must be established. Early research indicated that musicians outperformed nonmusicians on a range of psychological abilities beyond music processing. Alternatively, because better mental ability could also result from other training activities or an individual’s background characteristics, any conclusions on musical training were still premature. In fact, although some recent studies that provided musical training to nontrained children did show small mental improvements after a few weeks of training, most well-designed studies that trained nonexperts failed to find any of the benefits previously seen in expert musicians. In the current study, children aged 6 to 9 years old were given 3 weeks of music or dance lessons and measured on mental performance before and after training. To test for training-induced change, performance before and after training was compared with a nontrained group. To test whether learning music itself caused change, performance in trained groups was compared with each other, because dance is a similarly challenging skill and shares training features with music. No training effects were observed on any tested cognitive ability, which questions whether mental enrichment can occur from short-term training. S C I E N T I F I C A B S T R A C T Musical training is popularly believed to improve children’s cognitive ability. Early research evidence, mostly correlational, suggested that musicians outperform nonmusicians on many cognitive abilities. However, recent experimental evidence has failed to replicate most benefits, leaving it unclear whether previously demonstrated effects were a direct result of learning music. Although a few studies have shown some change with as little as a few weeks of training, the This article was published November 15, 2018. Annalise A. D’Souza and Melody Wiseheart, Department of Psychology and LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research, York University. The authors have made available for use by others the data that underlie the analyses presented in this article (D’Souza & Wiseheart, 2018), thus allowing replication and potential extensions of this work by qualified researchers. Next users are obligated to involve the data originators in their publication plans, if the originators so desire. This research was supported by Grant 410–2010-2747 to Melody Wiseheart from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The study was approved by the York University Human Participants Review Sub-Committee, e2008-177. Data have been previously presented at two conferences (D’Souza & Wiseheart, Development Conference, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, May 2014; Puckering, D’Souza, & Wiseheart, Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior and Cognitive Science Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, July 2014), and in a master’s thesis by Annalise A. D’Souza (Effects of Music and Dance Training on Executive Functions in Children, 2013). We thank our Fine Arts faculty collaborators and teachers (Hannah Luviano, Michael Marcuzzi, Rachel Muehrer, Tracey Norman, Lisa Sandlos) for designing and delivering the training curriculum. We thank research assistants (Galit Blumenthal, Katherine Descours, Rachita Saini, Lee Unger) for data collection and coding, and class volunteers for helping deliver the training (Marlene Almeida, Nooshin Davar, Kayla Dawson, Mahta Kakvan, Nakeesa Kooshafar, Pariah Mirazimi, Andrea Murua, Mearon Naman, Andrew Oh, Zina Rakhamilova, Pouya Rostami, Rachita Saini, Sahar Tabrizi, Rida Waseem, and Ariella Winter). We thank the Cognitive Flexibility Lab for input throughout all stages of this study. Copyright of this manuscript belongs to the author(s). The author(s) grant(s) the American Psychological Association the exclusive right to publish this manuscript first, identify itself as the original publisher, and claim all commercial exploitation rights. Upon publication, the manuscript is available to the public to copy, distribute, or display under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. Please use APA’s Online Permissions Process (Rightslink®) at http://www.apa. org/about/contact/copyright/seek-permission.aspx to request commercial reuse of this content. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Melody Wiseheart, Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J1P3, Canada. E-mail: melodywiseheart@gmail.com Archives of Scientific Psychology 2018, 6, 178–192 © 2018 The Author(s) DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.1037/arc0000048 2169-3269 Archives of Scientific Psychology www.apa. org/pubs/journals/arc larger training literature shows that transfer of skills between unrelated areas is extremely rare, especially in properly controlled studies. The current study used an experimental design to assess the cause (whether music uniquely produces change) and the effect (which cognitive abilities are impacted) of the link between music and cognition. Sixto 9-year-old children (n 75) with no prior training were randomly allocated to 3 weeks of music or dance training. Cognitive performance before and after training was compared between trained groups, because both training forms share features of training plus a nontrained control group to isolate training-induced change from normal maturation. No changes were found on any measured ability (inhibitory control, working memory, task switching, processing speed, receptive vocabulary, and nonverbal intelligence). Findings confirm evidence from the general training literature that training-induced improvements on cognitive performance are unlikely. Short-term training effects have a much narrower scope than previous evidence suggests.