Musical expertise, musical style, and visual attention

Abstract

Research has repeatedly demonstrated that people with experience within a particular domain have exceptional cognitive abilities for domain-specific information. Chess masters, for instance, are far better at memorizing visually presented chess positions than amateurs, and professional American football experts are highly sensitive to semantic changes in domain-related scenes. However, for non-domain-related material, experts’ performance becomes similar to novice performance. But how does this apply to music? We compared experienced musicians’ and novices’ attentional function and visual working memory using the change blindness flicker paradigm. The task was to detect minor changes between two otherwise identical music scores of differing styles: traditional (C-major, regular rhythms), contemporary (atonal, irregular rhythms), and random (nonsense music). We expected that (1) experienced musicians would detect changes faster, (2) the between-group difference would be larger for traditional than contemporary music, and (3) the groups’ performance would be more similar for random music. The experienced musicians detected changes significantly faster in both the contemporary and traditional music material, whereas the difference was nonsignificant for the random condition. The difference between groups was largest for contemporary music, despite its higher level of complexity. We discuss these results in relation to existing literature on expertise in visual information processing.