What provides children with a head start in detecting patterns, using predictive skills and developing statistical learning tasks?

Research shows children with musical training, compared to a cohort of the same age without training, show an ability to notice regularities and use them to learn and predict.

Lead study author Dr Pragati Mandikal-Vasuki, from Macquarie University’s Department of Linguistics, says musical training is linked with an increase in a child’s ability to pinpoint not only sound patterns but visual patterns too, potentially.

Further, Dr Mandikal-Vasuki says findings suggest music-based remediation can be an avenue for addressing specific learning impairments.

“These results increase understanding of how musical training alters learning pathways in the brain and this can help develop programs, potentially based on musical-learning therapies,” says Dr Mandikal-Vasuki.

The study, published in the journal Clinical Neurophysiology, involved 50 participants aged from 9 to 11 years. Participants were evenly split, with one group having at least a year and a half of private music lessons and the other group having no musical training.

The children listened to streams of sounds and watched streams of cartoon figures with hidden regularities. Behavioural detection mechanisms as well as measures of brain activity were used to assess whether the children could detect these hidden regularities. Children were also scored on their ability to detect minute changes in pitch, rhythm, and melody of sounds.

Dr Mandikal-Vasuki further found that understandably, children with musical training were better at perceiving small changes in melody, rhythm and pitch.  However, it was the test of detection regularities that showed some fascinating results. “The behavioural testing shows children with some music training are better at auditory statistical learning but not necessarily visual statistical learning – however, when we measured brain activity, as opposed to behavioural cues, the musically trained children were quicker to pick regularities in both visual and sound stimuli.”

With musically trained kids essentially faster at recognising audio and visual patterns, and better at auditory and statistical learning – it seems investment in music lessons just might lead to all-round benefits.