Several studies have reported an association between music training and enhanced visuo-spatial abilities—for example, musicians have been found to pay greater attention to local details of the visual scene. However, no studies have directly tested whether long-term music training impacts the global-to-local precedence commonly described in literature. We address this issue by comparing the performance of professional musicians and non-musicians in the traditional Navon test, in which it is required to identify large letters (global task) or the small letters composing the larger ones (local task). Our results did not support the idea of musicians having a different global-to-local precedence over non-musicians. However, musicians proved to be faster, without losing accuracy, than non-musicians in both global and local tasks. A control test showed that the two groups did not differ in motor response speed. In agreement with other studies describing an association between music expertise and enhanced cognitive abilities, our results point toward the idea that long-term music training may facilitate the performance in visuo-spatial tasks and, in particular, those tasks that require simultaneous processing of global and local information and inhibiting the irrelevant ones.

中文翻译：

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音乐家处理分层 Navon 字母的速度更快


几项研究报告了音乐训练与增强的视觉空间能力之间存在关联——例如，研究发现音乐家更加关注视觉场景的局部细节。然而，没有研究直接测试长期音乐训练是否会影响文献中通常描述的全球到本地优先级。我们通过比较专业音乐家和非音乐家在传统 Navon 测试中的表现来解决这个问题，在传统 Navon 测试中，需要识别大字母（全局任务）或组成大字母的小字母（本地任务）。我们的结果不支持音乐家与非音乐家具有不同的全球对本地优先级的观点。然而，事实证明，音乐家在全球和本地任务中都比非音乐家更快，而且不会失去准确性。对照测试显示，两组的运动响应速度没有差异。与其他描述音乐专业知识与增强认知能力之间关联的研究一致，我们的结果指向这样一个观点，即长期的音乐训练可能会促进视觉空间任务的表现，特别是那些需要同时处理全局和局部信息并抑制不相关的任务。