Musicians More Efficiently Dismiss Distractions, Study Finds
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In a groundbreaking study, researchers from Karolinska Institutet and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have uncovered the role of musicality in enhancing top-down and bottom-up attention abilities. The study, titled "How musicality enhances top-down and bottom-up selective attention: Insights from precise separation of simultaneous neural responses," was published in Science Advances.
The research, led by Andrea Irmer from the Leibniz Institute for Educational Research and Educational Information, combined frequency tagging and machine learning to achieve high-precision separation of neural responses to mixed melodies. This innovative approach allowed for the capture of cognitive and behavioural effects with stimulus precision, a method that could be applicable to other studies involving simultaneous stimuli.
The study found that in prefrontal areas, neural responses indicating higher sustained selective attention reflected better performance and musicality. The results suggest that musical training enhances neural mechanisms in the frontoparietal regions, boosting performance via improving top-down attention, reducing bottom-up distractions, and maintaining selective attention over time.
Interestingly, the study correlated positively with top-down attention in the left parietal cortex but negatively with bottom-up attention in the right. This indicates that musical training may help individuals to focus their attention more effectively, while also reducing the impact of distractions.
The work establishes the effectiveness of combining frequency tagging with machine learning to capture cognitive and behavioural effects with stimulus precision. The researchers emphasise that there are no conflicts of interest in the study.
The study was funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation and the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research. This research provides valuable insights into the cognitive benefits of musical training and could potentially lead to new methods for improving attention abilities.
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