MUSIC INSTRUCTION AIDS VERBAL MEMORY
WASHINGTON—Those piano lessons pay off in unexpected ways: According to
a new study, children with music training had significantly better verbal memory
than their counterparts without such training. Plus, the longer the training,
the better the verbal memory. These findings underscore how, when experience
changes a specific brain region, other skills that region supports may also
benefit –- a kind of cognitive side effect that could help people recovering
from brain injury as well as healthy children. The research appears in the July
issue of Neuropsychology, which is published by the American Psychological
Association (APA).
Psychologists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong studied 90 boys between age
six and 15. Half had musical training as members of their school’s string
orchestra program, plus lessons in playing classical music on Western
instruments, for one to five years. The other 45 participants were schoolmates
with no musical training. The researchers, led by Agnes S. Chan, Ph.D., gave the
children verbal memory tests, to see how many words they recalled from a list,
and a comparable visual memory test for images.
Students with musical training recalled significantly more words than the
untrained students, and they generally learned more words with each subsequent
trial of three. After 30-minute delays, the trained boys also retained more
words than the control group. There were no such differences for visual memory.
What’s more, verbal learning performance rose in proportion to the duration of
musical training.
Thus, the authors say, even fewer than six years of musical training can boost
verbal memory. More training, they add, may be even better because of a “greater
extent of cortical reorganization in the left temporal region.” In other words,
the more that music training stimulates the left brain, the better that side can
handle other assigned functions, such as verbal learning. It’s like cross
training for the brain, comparable perhaps to how runners find that stronger
legs help them play tennis better – even though they began wanting only to run.
Similarly, says Chan, “Students with better verbal memory probably will find it
easier to learn in school.”
Chan, along with Yim-Chi Ho, M.Phil., and Mei-Chun Cheung, Ph.D., followed up a
year later with the 45 orchestra students. Thirty-three boys were still in the
program; nine had dropped out fewer than three months after the first study. The
authors now compared a third group of 17 children who had started music training
after the initial assessment. This beginner’s group initially had shown
significantly lower verbal-learning ability than the more musically experienced
boys. However, one year later, these newer students again showed significant
improvement in verbal learning.
On the other hand, unlike the music students who stuck it out, the dropouts
showed no further improvement. However, although the beginners and the
continued-training groups tended to improve significantly, there was one
consolation for the dropouts: At least they didn’t backtrack. After a year, they
didn’t lose the verbal memory advantage they had gained prior to stopping
lessons.
Ho, Cheung and Chan propose that music training during childhood is a kind of
sensory stimulation that “somehow contributes to the reorganization-better
development of the left temporal lobe in musicians, which in turn facilitates
cognitive processing mediated by that specific brain area, that is, verbal
memory.” They contrast their evidence with inconclusive reports that listening
to Mozart improves spatiotemporal reasoning, which most researchers have been
unable to replicate. At the same time, Chan notes that it’s too simplistic to
divide brain functions (such as music) strictly into left or right, because “our
brain works like a network system, it is interconnected, very co-operative and
amazing.”
Most important, the authors say, “the [current] findings suggest that specific
experience might affect the development of memory in a predictable way in
accordance with the localization of brain functions. … Experience might affect
the development of cognitive functions in a systematic fashion.” More research
is needed, but knowledge of this mechanism can “stimulate further investigation
into ways to enhance human brain functioning and to develop a blueprint for
cognitive rehabilitation, such as using music training to enhance verbal
memory.”
Article: “Music Training Improves Verbal but Not Visual Memory: Cross-Sectional
and Longitudinal Explorations in Children,” Yim-Chi Ho, M.Phil.; Mei-Chun
Cheung, Ph.D.; and Agnes S. Chan, Ph.D.; The Chinese University of Hong Kong;
Neuropsychology, Vol. 17, No. 3.
Full text of the article is available from the APA Public Affairs Office or at
http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/neu173439.pdf
Reporters: Agnes S. Chan can be reached by Email or by phone at (852) 2609 5564.
The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC, is the largest
scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United
States and is the world’s largest association of psychologists. APA’s membership
includes more than 150,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and
students. Through its divisions in 53 subfields of psychology and affiliations
with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to
advance psychology as a science, as a profession and as a means of promoting
human welfare.
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