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Music and Cognition in Infancy and beyond

Many studies have shown that children around 5-7 years old who receive musical training often have stronger cognitive skills, such as attention, memory, and self-control. In previous studies, musically trained 6- to 7-year-olds performed better on executive function tasks compared to other children. But is it really music that’s causing those differences?

Based on the current state of research, it cannot be conclusively stated that musical experiences cause an increase in children’s cognitive abilities, because at this age pre-existing cognitive differences and also self-selection processes for musical activity cannot be fully controlled.

To really understand the effect of music, we need to look much earlier – in infancy. Infants are incredibly responsive to their environment, and their cognitive abilities develop rapidly in response to experiences.

We aim at investigating the potentially emerging link between musical experiences and cognitive abilities from infancy onwards while carefully considering the musical environment at home. So far, it is well known that infants have the remarkable capacity to alter and develop their cognitive abilities in response to their individual environmental experiences but almost no research exists on the relation between musical experience and cognition at this young age. There are only studies with preterm newborns indicating that musical experiences play a beneficial role in their neuro-cognitive development.

These results give rise to the hypothesis that musical experiences may have a high potential for enhancing cognitive and neuro-cognitive abilities also in full-term infants.