Musicians Do Better than Nonmusicians in Both Auditory and Visual Timing Tasks

the present study was designed to investigate differences in auditory and visual temporal information processing between musicians and nonmusicians. For this purpose, timing performance on a set of six different psychophysical temporal tasks for both the auditory and visual sensory modalities was compared in 40 formally trained musicians and 40 controls without musical experience. Across modalities, superior temporal acuity for musicians compared to nonmusicians could be shown for all temporal tasks except for temporal generalization. When comparing the two sensory modalities, temporal acuity was superior to auditory stimuli as compared to visual stimuli, with the exception of the temporal generalization task in the 1-s range. The overall pattern of our findings is consistent with the notion that musicians9 long-lasting intensive music training, starting in childhood, improves general timing ability irrespective of sensory modality.

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