Gade Miriam, Schlemmer Kathrin
Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, 85072 Eichstätt, Germany.
Medical School Berlin, Faculty of Sciences, 14197 Berlin, Germany.
Brain Sci. 2021 Apr 2;11(4):451. doi: 10.3390/brainsci11040451.
Cognitive flexibility enables the rapid change in goals humans want to attain in everyday life as well as in professional contexts, e.g., as musicians. In the laboratory, cognitive flexibility is usually assessed using the task-switching paradigm. In this paradigm participants are given at least two classification tasks and are asked to switch between them based on valid cues or memorized task sequences. The mechanisms enabling cognitive flexibility are investigated through two empirical markers, namely switch costs and n-2 repetition costs. In this study, we assessed both effects in a pre-instructed task-sequence paradigm. Our aim was to assess the transfer of musical training to non-musical stimuli and tasks. To this end, we collected the data of 49 participants that differed in musical training assessed using the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index. We found switch costs that were not significantly influenced by the degree of musical training. N-2 repetition costs were small for all levels of musical training and not significant. Musical training did not influence performance to a remarkable degree and did not affect markers of mechanisms underlying cognitive flexibility, adding to the discrepancies of findings on the impact of musical training in non-music-specific tasks.
认知灵活性使人类能够在日常生活以及专业环境（例如作为音乐家）中快速改变想要实现的目标。在实验室中，认知灵活性通常使用任务切换范式进行评估。在该范式中，参与者会被给予至少两项分类任务，并被要求根据有效的提示或记忆的任务序列在它们之间进行切换。通过两个实证指标，即切换成本和n-2重复成本，来研究实现认知灵活性的机制。在本研究中，我们在预先指导的任务序列范式中评估了这两种效应。我们的目的是评估音乐训练向非音乐刺激和任务的迁移。为此，我们收集了49名参与者的数据，这些参与者在使用戈德史密斯音乐素养指数评估的音乐训练方面存在差异。我们发现切换成本并未受到音乐训练程度的显著影响。对于所有音乐训练水平而言，n-2重复成本都很小且不显著。音乐训练并未对表现产生显著影响，也未影响认知灵活性潜在机制的指标，这进一步增加了关于音乐训练在非音乐特定任务中的影响的研究结果的差异。
