Music Exposure and the Development of Spatial Intelligence in Children.

Abstract

A serious challenge facing music cognition researchers is the problem of how to fit the discipline into traditional theories of child development, theories that do not easily account for the huge range of reasoning and behaviors used by people performing musical activities. In Frames of Mind, Howard Gardner (1983) has drawn from a wide body of knowledge to provide us with a new framework for thinking about cognition a framework that holds a special place for music. Musical ability is seen as its own discrete domain of intelligence, not particularly associated with linguistic, mathematical, or spatial intelligence. However, despite the fact that music appears to be a distinct area of learning that may be unrelated to other developmental accomplishments of young children, musical abilities and certain spatial abilities do seem to be allied. It seems that musical experiences, perhaps due to neurophysiological mechanisms, can help develop a small but important facet of spatial ability in adults, children, and even in rats. This paper presents my colleagues' and my recent research on the effects of music instruction on a specific type of spatial reasoning, spatial-temporal reasoning, in children.

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