Poster #1 - Impact of collective vs. individual music education on the development of socio-cognitive skills in disadvantaged children

• In Event: Poster Session 19

Abstract

Despite the observed success of musical and orchestral education programs with social vocation around the world (Majno, 2012 ; Uy 2012), and a paralleled interest of neuroscientists in the developmental impact of music training on individuals (Hallam, 2015 ; Peretz, 2018), no study has, to this day, sought to determine whether such collective music education in orchestra settings has a differentiated cognitive impact in comparison with an individual mode of music training.
This study aims at measuring possible differences of impact between a collective and an individual mode of music education on the development of executive and attentional functions. We also seek to assess whether a collective mode of music training – because it implies situations of musical interactions – fosters a greater development of socio-cognitive skills by contrast with individual music training.
Our test group (collective music) is constituted of ~50 children aged 7-12, trained in an El-Sistema like program (Démos orchestra with social vocation) in the suburbs of Paris. It is compared to an “individual music” control group of same size and paired in terms of age, sex, IQ and socioeconomic background but constituted of children trained in conservatories; and to a “no music” control group, also paired on these parameters, which serves for baseline assessments to enable a comparison between development with music (collective vs. individual) and normal developmental trajectories.
To measure the impact of the collective music program, we test the three groups longitudinally at three time points (at entrance, and then spanned every 6 months of musical practice). To assess the executive and attentional functions, we administer the Hearts and Flowers task (Davidson et al. 2006) which tests interference control in the visual domain and an auditory Simon task (developed ad hoc) to test it in the auditory domain. We suggest that while all groups might develop their visual interference control in a similar way, children in the test group might show stronger progresses in auditory interference control (having, during their musical training, to take the sounds of others into account before making their own). We also administer a child-friendly version of an Auditory Attention task (Hansen and Hillyard, 1980) to measure selective auditory attention, much at stake in a collective auditory scene (children of the test group might show greater progresses in this task by contrast with the two controls). As for socio-cognitive measures, we administer an Implicit Association Task to measure implicit biases towards in/out-groups, which we complement with explicit measures of liking, propensity to share and collaborate with people from an in/out-group. Children in the collective music group might show less negative biases towards the out-group but stronger positive biases towards the in-group than the two controls. We will analyse each task with linear mixed-effect models (with session and group as fixed effects and participants as random intercept).
In the end, this research shall bring out essential data to understand how musical and orchestral programs with social goals, as they are flourishing around the world, can foster the socio-cognitive development of their participants.

Authors

• Gaelle Rouvier, Paris Descartes University
  Presenting Author

• Grégoire Borst, Paris Descartes University

• Lorna Le Stanc

• Indiana Wollman, Cite de la Musique - Philharmonie de Paris