Musical experience predicts cognitive differences in a large, demographically matched sample

Research is mixed on whether playing a musical instrument leads to generalised cognitive benefits, and in which domains these improvements occur. Here, we leveraged a large (>6,000) sample of demographically-matched participants who either reported playing an instrument, or reported playing no instruments. Participants completed a well-established online battery of cognitive tasks to determine whether differences existed, and if so, in which cognitive domains. Linear regression, controlling for demographic variables, was used to examine differences between instrumentalists and non-instrumentalists. Follow-up analyses examined whether the number of instruments played predicted scores, and whether certain types of instrumentalists outperformed others. Robust group differences were found on eight cognitive tests, and in all cases instrumentalists outperformed non- instrumentalists. However, all of these effects were so small that they are unlikely to translate to any meaningful differences between individuals with or without musical experience. Cognitive scores correlated with number of instruments on nine tests, but no systematic differences existed between types of instrumentalists. While a causal relationship cannot be unequivocally confirmed, we propose that there may be some, albeit modest, transfer from musical experience to certain cognitive domains, and that these benefits scale with number of instruments played.