Lecture 5 - Music & Cognition Flashcards

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1
Q

What are different perspectives on the origins of music?

A
  1. Non-adaptationist accounts
  2. Adaptationist: reproductive benefits/sexual selection
  3. Adaptationist: survival benefits
    * Social cohesion (musical grooming
    * Bonding parent/child
    * Enhancing cognitive skills
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2
Q

What is cognition?

A

Mental processes of acquiring, storing, manipulating, and using information

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3
Q

Apply the ACP model to music and cognition

A

Factors: training
Cognition: memory, attention, flexibility, inhibition, motivation, enjoyment
Goals: vitality, productivity, performance
Indicators: speed, accuracy (school performance, scores on intelligence tests)

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4
Q

Does learning something in one domain transfer to other domains?

A
  • Not directly, but maybe through general cognitive skills
  • Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory of cognitive abilities
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5
Q

What does skill transfer depend on?

A

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

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6
Q

Why do we want to know if musical skill transfers to other domains?

A
  • 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?
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7
Q

What did Ruascher, Shaw & Ky find in their experiment (1993)

A

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

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8
Q

What is going on with the Mozart Effect

A
  1. Music influences arousal/mood
  2. Arousal/mood influences visuospatial abilities

Mozart is uplifting –> increases arousal –> increased performance
Albinoni is relaxed/sad –> decreases arousal –> lowers performance

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9
Q

Does the Mozart effect exist?

A

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

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10
Q

What is the model of brain plasticity?

A

Complex task requiring lots of practice, several modalities, including higher-order cognitive functions

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11
Q

What effect has playing a musical instrument on brain plasticity?

A

Increases:
1. Corpus Callosum Size
2. Cerebellar Volume
3. Symmetry of primary motor cortex

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12
Q

What does musical training affect?

A

Many motor areas & superior parietal cortex

Increase in grey-matter, correlates with practice

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13
Q

In which 4 areas do musicians have increased functional connectivity?

A
  1. Motor areas
  2. Auditory areas
  3. Somatosensory areas
  4. Visual areas
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14
Q

Why should we study musical training?

A
  1. Model of brain plasticity
  2. Musical training can lead to structural and functional changes
  3. Listening to music is harder to test
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15
Q

What is music training associated with?

A

Linguistic skills
* Verbal memory
* Reading skills
* Phonological awareness
* Prosody processing
* Decoding emotions

Non-linguistic skills
* Spatial abilities
* Mathematical abilities
* Working memory

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16
Q

With what does musical training correlate?

A

Everything

17
Q

What are some problems with studies in musical training?

A
  • Plenty of confounds present
  • Scientists still conclude causation while often it is correlation
  • Experimental studies are needed for causation
18
Q

Music and dementia

A

Increases mood with dement patients

19
Q

When does an intervention work?

A

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
20
Q

Problems with the perfect experiment

A
  1. Extremely expensive and difficult to set up
  2. Attrition -> the loss of study participants over time
  3. Swaminathan & Schellenberg argue for better design of correlational studies
  4. Alternative: meta-analysis
21
Q

What is a meta-analysis?

A

Synthesis of multiple experimental studies

22
Q

What are problems with meta-analysis?

A
  1. Often restricted to RTC’s
  2. Publication bias = only significant positive effects get published
    * “File-drawer problem”
  3. If this happens, we should see a disproportional number of studies with small sample sizes that have positive effects
  4. 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
  5. In the Sala & Gobet paper and in Bigand & Tillmann, the corrections are done
    in the sensitivity analyses