Learning a musical instrument may strengthen your attention and alertness from childhood to adulthood, according to a new study published in . British Journal of Psychology.
Researchers have long debated whether mentally demanding activities, such as playing chess, learning a language, or practicing a musical instrument, can enhance general cognitive skills such as attention and vigilance, which naturally develop with age. Music training is considered a promising candidate because it requires sustained concentration, complex coordination, and multitasking.
However, much of the previous evidence comparing musicians and non-musicians is difficult to interpret. These groups often differ in background factors such as education, socio-economic status, and personality, making it difficult to determine whether observed differences are due to musical training itself or reflect pre-existing characteristics of individuals who are more likely to pursue music.
A research team led by Rafael Roman Caballero at the University of Granada in Spain sought to address this selection bias. The scientists recruited 420 participants between the ages of 8 and 34, drawn from two separate groups: one of Spanish children and adolescents, and the other of university-aged adults.
The researchers used rigorous statistical methods to pair each musician with a non-musician who was well matched on a wide range of personal characteristics, including socioeconomic background, physical activity, video gaming habits, cognitive tastes, and personality traits. After filtering the data, a final sample of 268 perfectly matched participants remained.
Participants completed a computerized attention task called ANTI-Vea, which measures several different aspects of attention. Most notably, it measures “executive vigilance” (how well a person can detect rare events buried among distracting information) and “arousal vigilance” (the ability to remain alert over long periods of time and respond quickly to sudden stimuli).
The results revealed a consistent advantage for those with musical training on almost every measure tested. Regardless of age, musicians responded about 36 milliseconds faster on average than non-musicians. This difference was small but reliable across the age groups studied. They also showed less tendency to lose attention (often described as “zoning out”) and more stable response times in tasks designed to assess sustained vigilance.
Because the researchers looked at a wide range of age groups, they found two different patterns of how these benefits manifested. First, they observed a “threshold effect.” Even the youngest musicians, aged 8, showed some benefits (such as faster reaction times), suggesting that simply starting music lessons and reaching a certain amount of practice may improve alertness.
Second, we observed a “dose effect” in which some benefits became more pronounced with age. For example, it has been demonstrated that the ability to filter out irrelevant and distracting information (a skill known as executive control) improves more rapidly from adolescence to adulthood for people with musical training. This suggests that prolonged exposure to music may increase its benefits over time.
Roman Caballero and team concluded that their study “provides new evidence that formal musical training is associated with superior attention and vigilance across development. Thorough control of confounding variables in the design aims to more accurately estimate differences between musicians and non-musicians in isolation from other factors.”
However, the researchers cautioned that the observed effects were relatively small and milder than those reported in earlier, less tightly controlled studies. Furthermore, because this study did not follow the same individuals over many years, but only measured a single time point, it is not possible to establish a definitive causal relationship between music training and improved attention.
The study, “Benefits of attention and vigilance associated with formal musical training across childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood,” was authored by Rafael Roman-Caballero, Laura Trujillo, Paulina del Carmen Martín-Sánchez, Elisa Martín-Arévalo, and Juan Lupiañez.
