Lecture 5 - Music & Cognition

Question 1

What are different perspectives on the origins of music?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

What is cognition?

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Apply the ACP model to music and cognition

Answer 3

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

Question 4

Does learning something in one domain transfer to other domains?

Answer 4

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

Question 5

What does skill transfer depend on?

Answer 5

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

Question 6

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

Answer 6

• 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?

Question 7

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

Answer 7

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

Question 8

What is going on with the Mozart Effect

Answer 8

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

Question 9

Does the Mozart effect exist?

Answer 9

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

Question 10

What is the model of brain plasticity?

Answer 10

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

Question 11

What effect has playing a musical instrument on brain plasticity?

Answer 11

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

Question 12

What does musical training affect?

Answer 12

Many motor areas & superior parietal cortex

Increase in grey-matter, correlates with practice

Question 13

In which 4 areas do musicians have increased functional connectivity?

Answer 13

1. Motor areas
2. Auditory areas
3. Somatosensory areas
4. Visual areas

Question 14

Why should we study musical training?

Answer 14

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

Question 15

What is music training associated with?

Answer 15

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

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

Question 16

With what does musical training correlate?

Answer 16

Everything

Question 17

What are some problems with studies in musical training?

Answer 17

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

Question 18

Music and dementia

Answer 18

Increases mood with dement patients

Question 19

When does an intervention work?

Answer 19

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

Question 20

Problems with the perfect experiment

Answer 20

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

Question 21

What is a meta-analysis?

Answer 21

Synthesis of multiple experimental studies

Question 22

What are problems with meta-analysis?

Answer 22

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