Habibi Assal, Damasio Antonio, Ilari Beatriz, Elliott Sachs Matthew, Damasio Hanna
Brain and Creativity Institute, Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California.
Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California.
Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2018 Mar 6. doi: 10.1111/nyas.13606.
Evidence suggests that learning to play music enhances musical processing skills and benefits other cognitive abilities. Furthermore, studies of children and adults indicate that the brains of musicians and nonmusicians are different. It has not been determined, however, whether such differences result from pre-existing traits, musical training, or an interaction between the two. As part of an ongoing longitudinal study, we investigated the effects of music training on children's brain and cognitive development. The target group of children was compared with two groups of children, one involved in sports and another not enrolled in any systematic afterschool training. Two years after training, we observed that children in the music group had better performance than comparison groups in musically relevant auditory skills and showed related brain changes. For nonmusical skills, children with music training, compared with children without music or with sports training, showed stronger neural activation during a cognitive inhibition task in regions involved in response inhibition despite no differences in performance on behavioral measures of executive function. No such differences were found between music and sports groups. We conclude that music training induces brain and behavioral changes in children, and those changes are not attributable to pre-existing biological traits.
有证据表明，学习演奏音乐能提高音乐处理能力，并有益于其他认知能力。此外，对儿童和成人的研究表明，音乐家和非音乐家的大脑存在差异。然而，尚未确定这些差异是源于先天特质、音乐训练，还是两者的相互作用。作为一项正在进行的纵向研究的一部分，我们调查了音乐训练对儿童大脑和认知发展的影响。将目标儿童组与另外两组儿童进行比较，一组参与体育活动，另一组未参加任何系统的课外训练。训练两年后，我们观察到音乐组儿童在与音乐相关的听觉技能方面比对照组表现更好，并且大脑出现了相关变化。对于非音乐技能，接受音乐训练的儿童与未接受音乐训练或体育训练的儿童相比，在涉及反应抑制的区域进行认知抑制任务时，神经激活更强，尽管在执行功能的行为测量中表现没有差异。音乐组和体育组之间未发现此类差异。我们得出结论，音乐训练会引起儿童大脑和行为的变化，而且这些变化并非源于先天的生物学特质。
