Those of us who were made to spend our childhood Sunday afternoons slaving over ?Czerny?s Piano Keyboard Exercises? or desperately trying to coax ?Send in the Clowns? out of a ¾-sized flute could well have unwittingly improved our crossword skills by so doing, although we might not have upped our oil-painting talents one jot. ?Music training in childhood,? report Agnes Chan and collegues of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in Nature, ?may have long-term positive effects on verbal, but not visual, memory.?
Chan?s group compared the verbal memory of adults from two age-, educationally-, and academically-matched groups of female college students, one group having had no musical training in childhood, the other having had at least six years of musical training before the age of twelve. By asking them to perform spoken word-list learning tasks the researchers found that the adults with musical training learned significantly more words than those without. Whereas the two groups fared the same in visual memory tests requiring them to recall and draw pictures.
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