In general, the auditory processing of sounds requires the participation of some other mental processes in order to understand what comes to us through the ears. Working memory and various types of attention such as selective attention are known to be important for analyzing the content of conversations or even songs. In addition, it is proposed that there are relationships between both processes, having shown that a greater amplitude of working memory (greater number of information that can be maintained and mentally manipulated at the same time), is associated with a better attentional capacity and a greater ability to divide attention between tasks.
The tasks carried out by an orchestra conductor frequently activate their attention and working memory resources, since, for example, during a work they must monitor different scores simultaneously , requiring a high performance of their divided attention. In fact, the authors of the experiment hypothesized that conductors would have better attention skills than expert pianists, especially with divided attention . In addition, curiously, they suggested that these capacities would be better even in conductors still in training.
To test their hypotheses they had the collaboration of 30 musicians. Among them were 7 experienced conductors, 8 conducting students, 7 expert pianists and 7 piano students. All of them performed different tone discrimination tests, verbal working memory, tones and rhythms, as well as a long-term memory test and selective and divided attention tests using dichotic listening tasks (presenting different stimuli in each ear).
The results of this beautiful work, published not long ago in the journal Attention, Perception and Psychophysics (2015), showed that, as the authors had predicted, conductors performed better with divided attention tasks, and the better the more experienced they were. had (that is, the students did worse than the professional directors). In addition, it appears that there were no differences between the groups in working memory capacity and in general, the better this capacity, the better performance was achieved in selective and divided attention tasks.
The authors conclude that the data suggest that conductors have greater attentional flexibility that allows them to better switch between different focuses of attention . Possibly this is one more way to show that training in different mental activities throughout life makes us better in some of our cognitive abilities, as one more form of the phenomenon of brain plasticity.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
