Do kids who keep the beat in music class pay better attention?
Children who played more precisely in time with their teacher in a group music class were rated by their teachers as more attentive and showed steadier performance on a computer attention task.
Source
Group rhythmic synchrony and attention in children
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single-session correlational study: rhythmic synchrony recorded with custom gamelan-like instruments during a group music class, correlated with teacher SWAN ratings and Eriksen flanker performance, controlling for grade, gender and playing group
- N
- N=102 · 102 elementary schoolchildren in grades 2-6; participant recruitment details beyond this are not included in the available text
- Population
- Elementary schoolchildren aged 7-12 in a group music class
- Outcome
- Vector strength of synchrony with the instructor's beat; SWAN teacher-rated inattention and combined ADHD-like behaviour; flanker-task accuracy, reaction time and reaction-time variability
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What they did
The researchers built gamelan-like instruments with sensors on each key so that every child's mallet strikes could be recorded separately during an ordinary group music class. Children in grades 2 to 6 tried to play along with an instructor's steady beat for one minute, four times in a 30-minute session, and each child's synchrony was scored with a 'vector strength' measure. Homeroom teachers rated each child on the SWAN scale of attention and hyperactivity, and children completed an Eriksen flanker task; the team then computed rank correlations controlling for grade, gender and playing group.
What they found
Better synchronisers were rated as more attentive and as showing fewer ADHD-like behaviours, were more accurate on congruent flanker trials, had less variable reaction times, and showed a different congruent-incongruent reaction-time difference; six of the nine measures correlated significantly with synchrony. The pattern held, though somewhat weaker, when the 20% of children with the most ADHD-like ratings were removed, suggesting the link runs across the normal range. Girls synchronised better and were rated more attentive than boys, so gender was treated as a covariate.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study is correlational, so it cannot say that rhythm training would improve attention or that attention problems cause poor timing; the authors say this explicitly. Attention was measured mostly by a single teacher rating and one short flanker task, and the study included no measures of school achievement. Group playing also demands selective listening to the leader's instrument, which may contribute to the synchrony score independent of timing ability. Details such as how children were recruited and the exact correlation sizes are not in the available text (they appear in tables).
Key terms
- Rhythmic synchrony
- The ability to time one's own actions to coincide with an external beat or with other people.
- Vector strength
- A circular-statistics measure from 0 to 1 of how consistently a player strikes at the same phase of the beat; 1 means perfectly consistent timing and 0 means random timing.
- SWAN rating scale
- A teacher- or parent-rated questionnaire covering inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity that captures both strengths and weaknesses, so it describes the full range of attention, not only clinical problems.
- Eriksen flanker task
- A task in which people respond to the direction of a central arrow while ignoring flanking arrows that point the same or opposite way.
- Reaction-time variability (RTV)
- How much a person's response times fluctuate from trial to trial, often elevated in ADHD.
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Quiz yourself
What did the vector strength measure capture in this study?
Common questions
Why use vector strength instead of just counting missed beats?
Vector strength reflects how consistently a child hits at the same point in the beat, and it is not thrown off if the child misses a few beats or the leader drifts in tempo. That makes it better suited to a real classroom.
Is this just about children with ADHD?
No. The link held across the whole range of attention ratings and remained when the most ADHD-like fifth of children were removed, which the authors take to mean timing and attention are related in the general population.
Does this show that music lessons improve attention?
No. It shows that the two go together at one point in time. An intervention study would be needed to test whether training synchrony changes attention.
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