This is an interesting article and summarises important findings on the enhanced abilities of trained musicians when it comes to attention skills.
But it is also interesting to delve into the paper itself and look at the section titled “Methods”. This tells us what the researchers defined as trained musicians. These details should always be taken into account when evaluating any findings.
In the case of this paper the researchers defined musicians and non-musicians as follows:
Musicians
- 18 participants
- 13 male, 5 female
- Age range: 17–33 years (mean age = 25.39 years, SD = 3.92)
- Full-time conservatory students or conservatory graduates with an average of 12.22 years of practice
- All piano players
Non-musicians
- 18 participants
- 15 male, 3 female
- Age range: 19–33 years (mean age = 26.72 years, SD = 4.61).
- University students that had never received any formal music lessons and could neither play nor read music.
You be the judge, is this a good sample group to test their hypothesis?
Check out the original article here