Lecture 5 - Music & Cognition Flashcards
What are different perspectives on the origins of music?
- Non-adaptationist accounts
- Adaptationist: reproductive benefits/sexual selection
- Adaptationist: survival benefits
* Social cohesion (musical grooming
* Bonding parent/child
* Enhancing cognitive skills
What is cognition?
Mental processes of acquiring, storing, manipulating, and using information
Apply the ACP model to music and cognition
Factors: training
Cognition: memory, attention, flexibility, inhibition, motivation, enjoyment
Goals: vitality, productivity, performance
Indicators: speed, accuracy (school performance, scores on intelligence tests)
Does learning something in one domain transfer to other domains?
- Not directly, but maybe through general cognitive skills
- Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory of cognitive abilities
What does skill transfer depend on?
how much the learned skill overlaps with the tested skill
* This is a lot for near transfer
* This is less for far transfer
* Near and far transfer exist on a continuum
Why do we want to know if musical skill transfers to other domains?
- Should music lessons be obligatory in schools?
- Why do we think video gaming is a bad thing?
- Can we prevent cognitive aging by doing sudoku’s?
What did Ruascher, Shaw & Ky find in their experiment (1993)
Listening to Mozart improves spatial reasoning
* 3 listening conditions
* 3 different spatial reasoning tests
Complex brain activity for both listening to Mozart and spatial tasks
What is going on with the Mozart Effect
- Music influences arousal/mood
- Arousal/mood influences visuospatial abilities
Mozart is uplifting –> increases arousal –> increased performance
Albinoni is relaxed/sad –> decreases arousal –> lowers performance
Does the Mozart effect exist?
Yes
* Last for 20 minutes
* It is caused by an increase in aurousal
* It only works for upbeat Mozart and Mozart lovers
* Choose whatever genre works for you
* It is not transfer of learned skills
What is the model of brain plasticity?
Complex task requiring lots of practice, several modalities, including higher-order cognitive functions
What effect has playing a musical instrument on brain plasticity?
Increases:
1. Corpus Callosum Size
2. Cerebellar Volume
3. Symmetry of primary motor cortex
What does musical training affect?
Many motor areas & superior parietal cortex
Increase in grey-matter, correlates with practice
In which 4 areas do musicians have increased functional connectivity?
- Motor areas
- Auditory areas
- Somatosensory areas
- Visual areas
Why should we study musical training?
- Model of brain plasticity
- Musical training can lead to structural and functional changes
- Listening to music is harder to test
What is music training associated with?
Linguistic skills
* Verbal memory
* Reading skills
* Phonological awareness
* Prosody processing
* Decoding emotions
Non-linguistic skills
* Spatial abilities
* Mathematical abilities
* Working memory
With what does musical training correlate?
Everything
What are some problems with studies in musical training?
- Plenty of confounds present
- Scientists still conclude causation while often it is correlation
- Experimental studies are needed for causation
Music and dementia
Increases mood with dement patients
When does an intervention work?
Best design: Randomized controlled trial (RCT)
* Random assignment of clients to groups
* Use of active control groups
1. Matched on activity, attractiveness, novelty, and enthusiasm of the teacher
2. To avoid placebo effects
- Inclusion & exclusion criteria are clear, population is specified
- Enough participants to be able to detect differences (power, sample size)
- Specified intervention of pre-determined length and outcome measures
- Blind assessment
- Replication by other teams
Problems with the perfect experiment
- Extremely expensive and difficult to set up
- Attrition -> the loss of study participants over time
- Swaminathan & Schellenberg argue for better design of correlational studies
- Alternative: meta-analysis
What is a meta-analysis?
Synthesis of multiple experimental studies
What are problems with meta-analysis?
- Often restricted to RTC’s
- Publication bias = only significant positive effects get published
* “File-drawer problem” - If this happens, we should see a disproportional number of studies with small sample sizes that have positive effects
- Check for heterogeneity
* If there are very large differences between different studies, there are things going on
beyond the effect of interest
* Sometimes, influential cases are removed - In the Sala & Gobet paper and in Bigand & Tillmann, the corrections are done
in the sensitivity analyses
