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Music, IQ, and the executive function

Article  in  British Journal of Psychology · August 2011

DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02029.x · Source: PubMed

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 306

The
British
Psychological
British Journal of Psychology (2011), 102, 306–308

C 2011 The British Psychological Society
Society

www.wileyonlinelibrary.com

Commentary
Music, IQ, and the executive function

David J. Hargreaves∗ and Aleksandar Aksentijevic

Applied Music Research Centre, Roehampton University, London, UK

This article is a commentary on ‘Examining the association between music lessons and
intelligence’ (Schellenberg, 2011).

The association between musical experience and cognition is relatively well established,
and this relationship is of great interest not only in music psychology research, but
also to parents, educators, and policy makers. Music is also being used ever more
widely as a relatively inexpensive and potentially effective therapeutic and clinical tool.
Nevertheless, as Schellenberg (2011) points out in this provocative and well-argued
paper, the relationship between music and cognition is highly complex. We will focus
on two main issues of concern: the first is the direction of the causal relationships
proposed, which leads on to the related questions of how the characteristics of the
sample in this study may have influenced its correlational results, and the status of the
construct of executive function (EF). The second main issue is the putative uniqueness
of musical intervention.
The causality issue is the central concern of the study. Can the interacting variables
that mediate the relationship between music and cognition really be disentangled?
Schellenberg argues that the relationship between the presence or absence of music
lessons and cognitive functioning is not necessarily causal (i.e., that music lessons cause
increases in cognitive functioning), and also challenges the notion that the relationship
between music training and IQ is mediated by EF. Instead, he interprets his results
as demonstrating that ‘children with higher IQs are more likely than their lower IQ
counterparts to take music lessons, and to perform well on a variety of tests of cognitive
ability except for those measuring executive function’ (p. 283).
Our first reaction is to ask how many researchers actually hold the second of these
two hypotheses, which implicitly grants a higher level of explanatory power to EF than
to IQ. Might Schellenberg be challenging a ‘straw man’ argument here? Another obvious
question is the extent to which the intercorrelations between the presence/absence of
music lessons and measures of EF and IQ might also be influenced by musical aptitude,
even though this is known to be positively correlated with general IQ. There may

∗ Correspondence should be addressed to Professor David Hargreaves, Applied Music Research Centre, Southlands College,
Roehampton University, Roehampton Lane, London SW15 5SL, UK (e-mail: d.j.hargreaves@roehampton.ac.uk).

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02029.x
 Music, IQ, and the executive function 307

be higher correlations between musical training and the different cognitive measures
in pupils with high rather than low levels of musical aptitude, for example, but this
question must await further research.
The attempt to disentangle the roles and effects of EF and IQ brings up the related
issue of the extent to which these two constructs are conceptually and empirically
distinct from one another, especially when they are based on similar tests. Schellenberg
acknowledges that one test (Digit Symbol-Coding) is actually present in both the
EF and the IQ batteries in this study, although the five tests that represent EF are
themselves uncorrelated. This calls into question the status of EF as an independent
construct.
There are also two aspects of the sample in this study which have the potential
to influence the correlational results. First, there were socio-economic class differences
between the parents of the musically trained and untrained groups, as well as differences
between them in the number of out of school activities in which they engaged (trained
pupils did more): although these were partialled out statistically in the analyses, this
raises the possibility that something like social class effects might also have influenced
the results. Second, a further complication is that all of the participants in the study
were of high IQ: this could give rise to restriction of range effects, which result in lower
correlations.
Although our understanding of the relationship between music and cognition is
advancing, not least through the substantive efforts by Schellenberg and his colleagues,
disentangling these causal relationships seems to us to be a distant prospect. We are by
no means sure that traditional notions of linear causality can be applied in this context
when it is clear that the neural as well as the behavioural mechanisms involved are
highly interactive and non-linear systems, abounding in feedback loops and multi-causal
processes.
One important question that the study does not answer is why high IQ children
choose music lessons. Is this a consequence of their greater willingness to engage in
challenging activities, or of a unique affinity between music and cognition? This perhaps
lies at the core of the problem. If the former is true, there would be little point in
treating music as special – it could be viewed as one of many activities which can
promote cognition, such that we might expect the high IQ sample also to be better at art
or mathematics, for example. If music does possess a unique relationship with cognition,
however, the current approaches do not seem to be able specify what this might
be.
There is a great deal of evidence that certain aspects of music are indeed cognitively
unique. For instance, unlike language, music is uniquely a ‘spatio-temporal’ domain of
activity, which engages both hemispheres, which are differentially attuned to processing
structural and temporal information. While this might not represent a clear evolutionary
advantage, it is a potential starting point for fruitful debate. This perhaps explains the
close relationship between musical training and general intelligence. The non-semantic
nature of musical information demands the involvement of both hemispheres, such that
music could act as a regulator of the general cognitive function, maintaining a dynamic
equilibrium between the hemispheric biases towards linguistic and visuo-spatial abilities
(Gibson, Folley, & Park, 2009). This in turn might explain the affinity of high IQ children
with music, in that they seek activities that are most likely fully to engage their brains.
These are important questions because music has the potential to be a powerful yet
accessible medium for enhancing not only cognitive abilities, but also social, emotional,
and other capacities, and consequently the academic and life prospects of millions of
308 David J. Hargreaves and Aleksandar Aksentijevic

children and adults. Glenn Schellenberg has performed a valuable service by his attempts
to understand the mechanisms and patterns of causality underlying these complex
relationships.

References
Gibson, C., Folley, B. S., & Park, S. (2009). Enhanced divergent thinking and creativity in musicians;
a behavioral and near-infrared spectroscopy study. Brain and Cognition, 69(1), 162–169.
doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2008.07.009
Schellenberg, E. G. (2011). Examining the association between music lessons and intelligence.
British Journal of Psychology, 102, 283–302. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.2010.02000.x

Received 3 February 2011; revised version received 3 February 2011

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