Tuning up young brains.
Music lessons crank up the volume of spatial reasoning skills employed by preschool children, according to a study directed by Frances H. Rauscher of the University of California, Irvine. Early musical training may strengthen communication among brain areas involved in music as well as endeavors such as complex mathematics, sculpting, and navigation, Rauscher proposes."Music instruction can improve a child's spatial intelligence for a long time, perhaps permanently," she asserts.
Rauscher's team studied 19 preschoolers who had weekly keyboard lessons taught by a professional piano instructor and daily singing sessions led by a professional vocal instructor; another 15 preschoolers had no musical training. Participants, ranging in age from 3 to 5, completed five spatial reasoning tasks at the start, middle, and end of the 8-month study.
Scores on an "object assembly task," in which a child arranges pieces of a puzzle to form a picture of an object or animal, improved markedly after 4 months of music training, Rauscher says. Children who completed musical training dramatically outscored controls on this task, although both groups started out with roughly the same scores. An earlier study conducted by Rauscher yielded comparable results for 10 preschoolers who took music lessons.
The object assembly task was the only one that required youngsters to form an ideal mental image of an entity and orient tangible items to reproduce it, the Irvine researcher argues. Music lessons improved the ability of several brain areas to work together and orchestrate this ability, she theorizes.
Further research must examine whether keyboard or singing lessons alone elevate spatial reasoning, how long such effects last, and whether children in elementary school respond similarly to music lessons, Rauscher notes.
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| Title Annotation: | early music training encourages development of spacial intelligence |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Science News |
| Article Type: | Brief Article |
| Date: | Aug 27, 1994 |
| Words: | 277 |
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