Trained musicians have demonstrate greater executive control of attention and are less likely to be distracted by irrelevant stimuli while performing demanding tasks, a new study has revealed.
The research published in the journal Heliyon revealed that musical training produces lasting cognitive mechanism that helps musicians to be more attentive than non-musicians.
According to the lead author Paulo Barraza, PhD, University of Chile, professional musicians are able to respond quickly and accurately and focus on what is important to perform a task, and more effectively filter out incongruent and irrelevant stimuli than non-musicians.
“Our study investigated the effects of systematic musical training on the main components of the attentional system. Our findings demonstrate greater inhibitory attentional control abilities in musicians than non-musicians. Notably, the more years of training musicians have, the more efficient they are at controlling their attention,” said Mr Barraza.
The attentional system consists of three subsystems that are mediated by anatomically distinct neural networks: alerting, orienting, and executive control networks.
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The alerting function is associated with maintaining states of readiness for action. The orienting function is linked to the selection of sensory information and change of attentional focus. The executive control function is involved both in the suppression of irrelevant, distracting stimuli and in top-down attentional control.
During the study,18 professional pianists and a matched group of 18 non-musician professional participants were engaged in an attentional networks test. The participants viewed and provided immediate feedback on rapidly presented image variations to test the efficiency of their reactive behavior.
Mean scores of the alerting, orienting, and executive networks for the group of musicians were 43.84 milliseconds (ms), 43.70 ms, and 53.83 ms; for the group of non-musicians mean scores were 41.98 ms, 51.56 ms, and 87.19 ms, respectively. The higher scores show less efficient inhibitory attentional control.
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The study’s further demonstrated a correlation between the alerting and orienting networks in musicians than in non-musicians, possibly reflecting a functional relationship between these attentional networks derived from the deliberate practice of music.
Prior research has shown that systematic musical training results in changes to the brain that correlate with the enhancement of some specific musical abilities, and the impact on the processing of extra-musical cognitive abilities for instance working memory.
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