The Effect of Music Training on Visual and Aural Bisection Biases.
Leung, Carolyn A.
2014
- Abstract: Previous studies have shown that musical training can improve cognitive processes. The purpose of the study was to investigate how long-term musical training affects visual and aural perception. This study was an expansion of the work by Patston, Corballis, Hogg, and Tippett, which found that musicians were more accurate on a line bisection task than non-musicians (2006). Twenty musicians ... read moreand 20 non-musicians performed the same line bisection task with both hands, an audiospatial bisection task, and a pitch bisection task. We hypothesized that the musicians would be more accurate than the non-musicians on all three tasks. The results indicate that the musicians were not significantly better than non-musicians on the line bisection task, failing to replicate the previous research. However, an interaction was found between participant group and hand used. Musicians were about equally accurate with both hands, but non-musicians were more accurate with their right hands than with their left hands. Musicians and non-musicians were not significantly different on the audiospatial bisection task. Musicians were significantly more accurate than non-musicians on the pitch bisection task. More hours spent practicing per week, more years playing an instrument, and having relative pitch all correlated to smaller errors in the pitch bisection task. This suggests that musical training aids in processing pitch intervals. Future studies may examine if the Western musical scale influenced the musicians’ responses.read less
- ID:
- s4655s95j
- Component ID:
- tufts:sd.0000074
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
