Music and Cognitive Abilities

By E. G. Schellenberg, Michael W. Weiss. 2005

548 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Does music make you smarter? Music listening and music lessons have been claimed to confer intellectual advantages. Any association between music and intellectual functioning would be notable only if the benefits apply reliably to nonmusical abilities and if music is unique in producing the effects. The available evidence indicates that music listening leads to enhanced performance on a variety of cognitive tests, but that such effects are short-term and stem from the impact of music on arousal level and mood, which, in turn, affect cognitive performance; experiences other than music listening have similar effects. Music lessons in childhood tell a different story. They are associated with small but general and long-lasting intellectual benefits that cannot be attributed to obvious confounding variables such as family income and parents' education. The mechanisms underlying this association have yet to be determined.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Education, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f35eccb6459a4240cf9567e93c401b15a3bbda61

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Citations in the corpus

Long-Term Positive Associations between Music Lessons and IQ. (2006, background): “Previous reports have identified links between musical training and a wide variety of intellectual abilities (for reviews, see Schellenberg, 2003, 2005, 2006).”
Bilingualism and cognition (2014, background): “Music lessons also enhance IQ (Moreno et al., 2011; Schellenberg, 2005; Schellenberg & Weiss, 2013).”
The effect of piano lessons on the vocabulary and verbal sequencing skills of primary grade students (2009, unknown): “…& Feil, 1985; Helmhold, Rammsayer, & Altenmüller, 2005; Hetland, 2000a, 2000b; Ho, Cheung, & Chan, 2003; Hurwitz, Wolff, Bortnick, & Kokas, 1975; Rauscher & Shaw, 1998; Rauscher, Shaw, & Ky, 1993, 1995; Rauscher & Zupan, 2000; Schellenberg, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006; Standley & Hughes, 1997).”
Music lessons, pitch processing, and g (2010, background): “Nonetheless, most previous findings of associations between music lessons and intellectual abilities in adulthood come from samples of undergraduates (for reviews see Schellenberg, 2005, 2006a ) and it was precisely these findings that we sought to explain.”
Background music can aid second language learning (2014, background): “…that is most often ascribed to the music providing a boost in psycho-physiological arousal and mood (Cassidy & MacDonald, 2007; Furnham & Strbac, 2002; Jones, West, & Estell, 2006; Schellenberg, 2005, 2006; Schellenberg, Nakata, Hunter, & Tamoto, 2007; Thompson, Schellenberg, & Husain, 2001).”
Meta-Analysis of Action Video Game Impact on Perceptual, Attentional, and Cognitive Skills (2018, background): “…which is essential in defining the impact of the video game genre studied on various cognitive outcomes, as our aim is here (see also Boot & Simons, 2012; Green, Strobach, & Schubert, 2014; Jacoby & Ahissar, 2013; Schellenberg & Weiss, 2013 for best practices in behavioral intervention studies).”
The effects of musical training on verbal memory (2008, background): “Rather, enhancing one’s mood or arousal before performing a cognitive task will improve performance (Chabris et al., 1999; Schellenberg, 2005).”
Are the Emotions Expressed in Music Genre-specific? An Audio-based Evaluation of Datasets Spanning Classical, Film, Pop and Mixed Genres (2011, background): “…the individual differences in emotions (Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2011), for testing the role of arousal in performance of non-musical tasks (e.g. Schellenberg, 2005), for understanding the subjective experience of chills (e.g. Blood & Zatorre, 2001), or for understanding aesthetic experiences…”
Did sexual selection shape human music? Testing predictions from the sexual selection hypothesis of music evolution using a large genetically informative sample of over 10,000 twins (2015, background): “Musical aptitude has been shown to be correlated with linguistic abilities, such as phonological awareness, pronunciation, and reading, even when controlling for general intelligence (Milovanov & Tervaniemi, 2011; Schellenberg & Weiss, 2013).”