Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Musical Expertise Has Minimal Impact On Dual Task Performance, Gianna Cocchini, Maria Serena Filardi, Marcela Crhonkova, Andrea R. Halpern

Andrea Halpern

Studies investigating effect of practice on dual task performance have yielded conflicting findings, thus supporting different theoretical accounts about the organisation of attentional resources when tasks are performed simultaneously. Because practice has been proven to reduce the demand of attention for the trained task, the impact of long-lasting training on one task is an ideal way to better understand the mechanisms underlying dual task decline in performance. Our study compared performance during dual task execution in expert musicians compared to controls with little if any musical experience. Participants performed a music recognition task and a visuo-spatial task separately (single task) …