Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci.

ISSN 0077-8923

A N N A L S O F T H E N E W Y O R K A C A D E M Y O F SC I E N C E S
Issue: The Neurosciences and Music V

Music training and inhibitory control: a multidimensional

model
Sylvain Moreno1,2 and Faranak Farzan3,4
1
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. 2 Rotman Research Institute, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada. 3 Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Temerty Centre for Therapeutic Brain Intervention, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada. 4 Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Address for correspondence: Sylvain Moreno, Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest 3560 Bathurst Street, 914 VS, Toronto,
ON, Canada M6A 2E1. sylvain.jp.moreno@gmail.com

Training programs aimed to improve cognitive skills have either yielded mixed results or remain to be validated. The
limited benefits of such regimens are largely attributable to weak understanding of (1) how (and which) interventions
provide the most cognitive improvements; and (2) how brain networks and neural mechanisms that underlie specific
cognitive abilities can be modified selectively. Studies indicate that music training leads to robust and long-lasting
benefits to behavior. Importantly, behavioral advantages conferred by music extend beyond perceptual abilities to
even nonauditory functions, such as inhibitory control (IC) and its neural correlates. Alternative forms of arts
engagement or brain training do not appear to yield such enhancements, which suggests that music uniquely taps
into brain networks subserving a variety of auditory as well as domain-general mechanisms such as IC. To account
for such widespread benefits of music training, we propose a framework of transfer effects characterized by three
dimensions: level of processing, nature of the transfer, and involvement of executive functions. We suggest that
transfer of skills is mediated through modulation of general cognitive processes, in particular IC. We believe that this
model offers a viable framework to test the extent and limitations of music-related changes.

Keywords: musicians; children; training; plasticity; executive functions; ERP; inhibitory control

Music training and inhibitory control: a
multidimensional model
One of the passionate questions of neuroscience
is to understand the breadth and extent of brain
plasticity. How can we change our brain? How
can we overcome impairments? And how can we
increase our capacities? Brain plasticity is at the
core of these questions. It is defined as the “ability
of the brain to modify itself or be altered by the
external environment.”1 In fact, several groups of
scientists have been trying to develop brain-training
programs to improve cognitive skills, but these
attempts have so far revealed mixed results.2,3
To date it has been shown that the brain can be
modified through training programs, and training
one activity can improve behavioral performance
and modify brain correlates of the trained activity.
For example, Draganski et al.4 showed that learning
to juggle induced changes in the brain areas
related to visuospatial processing. However, the
possibility of transferring the learned skills to
different activities remains an open question. How
might training programs lead to improvement in
untrained tasks, potentially improving a wide array
of daily cognitive functions? When studies report
an improvement in performance on untrained
tasks (e.g., see Refs. 5 and 6), the magnitude of
the improvement tends to be small. Other studies
report no transfer to untrained tasks.3,7
For two decades now, practicing music has been
seen as a way to capitalize on brain plasticity, and
successful transfer to nonmusical domains has been
reported following music training (e.g., see Ref. 8;
for a review, see Ref. 1). There has been evidence of
a link between musicianship and higher behavioral
performance in different activities such as auditory
working memory (WM)9–11 and visual WM,10,12

doi: 10.1111/nyas.12674
Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1337 (2015) 147–152 
C 2014 New York Academy of Sciences. 147
Music training and inhibitory control
mathematics,13 visuospatial skills,14 language skills
(for reviews, see Ref. 15), reading abilities,16,17 and
acquisition of a second language.18–20 Many of
these studies suffered from methodological prob-
lems, however, which cast doubts about the relia-
bility and validity of the findings. In recent years,
a growing number of experimental studies (i.e., in-
vestigating causation) with reasonable methodology
and appropriate control conditions have confirmed
positive transfer after music training not only in
auditory processing21 but also in other domains
such as reading,22,23 language skills,16,23,24 inhibitory
control (IC),16 and intelligence.8 These findings
provide compelling evidence that music training is
a viable approach for studying transfer of skills and
the accompanying changes in brain structure and
function. We now need a testable model that de-
scribes how and why music training leads to transfer
of skills.
Transfer of skills between two abilities occurs
when the novel and trained tasks recruit overlapping
processing components and shared brain regions.25
One good example comes from the work of Dahlin
et al.,26 who showed that 5 weeks of computer-
based updating training (i.e., letter memory task)
that stimulates and influences the functioning of the
striatal brain region led to improvement in a differ-
ent task (i.e., 3-back test of WM using numbers),
which engaged similar processes (e.g., updating)
and stimulated the same brain region (i.e., striatal).
Moreover, results did not show improvement in a
Stroop task that did not engage the striatal updating
system.
Executive functions (EFs) represent a potential
mechanism that could explain transfer from music
training to nonmusical cognitive abilities. EFs are
engaged in any daily cognitive activity, which means
any changes in EFs could potentially influence a wide
range of activities. In other words, EFs could medi-
ate the causal associations between music training
and nontrained cognitive abilities27,28 (Fig. 1). EFs
are defined as “a set of general-purpose control pro-
cesses that regulate one’s thoughts and behaviors.”29
This set of processes is not precisely defined and
varies across authors or theories. A broad definition
considers EFs to comprise WM, selective attention
and inhibition, task switching, updating, and moni-
toring. The broad definition makes it difficult, how-
ever, to specify the neural processes that subserve
EFs and lead to transfer of skills across tasks.
148 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1337 (2015) 147–152 
Moreno & Farzan
Figure 1. The mediating mechanism by which EFs could me-
diate the causal associations between music training and non-
trained cognitive abilities.
In a recent article, Miyake and Friedman pro-
posed the unity/diversity framework to explain
EFs.29 By means of factor analysis, they identified
three EF components: updating, shifting, and inhi-
bition. Their analysis showed that these three abil-
ities could be separated, but each of them could be
decomposed into what is common across all three
(i.e., unity) and what is unique to that particular
ability (i.e., diversity). One of their main findings
was that the common EF variable was almost per-
fectly correlated with the inhibition variable. This
finding raises the possibility that inhibition could
be the main factor mediating transfer of skills be-
tween cognitive abilities. Diamond30 refers to the
same concept as inhibitory control (IC), which she
defines as “being able to control one’s attention,
behavior, thoughts, and/or emotions to override a
strong internal predisposition or external lure, and
instead do what’s more appropriate or needed.” Di-
amond’s definition is particularly useful because it
links IC to a group of tasks such as the Go/No-Go
task, in which participants are instructed to with-
hold responding to a stimulus that frequently re-
quires a response.
In the past few years, we have been exploring the
possibility that EF, and particularly its subcompo-
nent IC, mediates the transfer of skills. Previously,
Thorell et al.31 have been one of the first groups
postulating the hypothesis that EF could mediate
the transfer process of cognitive training. Indeed,
Miyake and Shah32 formulated the idea that activ-
ities such as music training involve WM, selective
C 2014 New York Academy of Sciences.
Moreno & Farzan
attention, IC, task switching, updating, and moni-
toring, which are collectively all components of EF.
The findings in the literature seem to confirm this
hypothesis. Recent correlational results showed that
musicianship may have an influence on EFs.33,34
In addition to behavioral assessment, several
investigators have evaluated the effect of music
expertise and music training on brain processing
underlying EFs and assessed the brain–behavior re-
lationship using noninvasive neuroimaging tech-
niques such as electroencephalography (EEG). For
example, George and Coch used event-related po-
tentials (ERPs) not only to investigate the rela-
tionship between music training and WM at the
behavioral level but also to further examine the neu-
ral mechanisms that underlie the transfer effect.10
These authors used a standardized test of WM
(i.e., phonological, visuospatial, and executive WM
subtests of the Test of Memory and Learning—
TOMAL-235 ) and recorded ERPs in standard au-
ditory and visual oddball paradigms. The authors
referred to the oddball paradigms as WM tasks. This
study led to two important observations. First, they
reported a positive relationship between musical
experience and better WM performance in both
auditory and visual modalities. Second, ERP anal-
ysis showed that neural activity (reflected by ERP
P300 components) was modulated by musical ex-
pertise. Their results showed that musicians had
shorter P300 latencies, indicating a faster updat-
ing of WM in both the auditory and visual do-
mains. Moreover, musicians showed larger P300
amplitudes, revealing that they allocated more neu-
ral resources to auditory stimuli. In summary,
musicians showed an increased sensitivity to the au-
ditory standard/deviant difference and less effort-
ful updating of auditory WM. However, the link
between music training and EF is not as straight-
forward. Indeed, Schellenberg investigated the as-
sociation between music expertise and transfer of
skills in children between 9 and 12 years old. Two
groups of children participated in this study, musi-
cians (i.e., with over 2 years of music lessons outside
of school) and nonmusicians (i.e., with no training
outside of school).36 Schellenberg used a measure
of IQ (Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence37 )
and a battery of five EF tasks. The results of
this correlational study showed that the IQ scores
and performance on EF tasks were correlated and
that musician children had higher IQ scores than
Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1337 (2015) 147–152 
C 2014 New York Academy of Sciences.
Music training and inhibitory control
their nonmusician peers. However, the association
between musical training and EF was negligible, and
there was no evidence that the relationship between
music training and intelligence was mediated by EF.
In summary, the evidence showing an influence of
musical training on EF is limited and sparse, and
further studies are required to investigate the im-
pact of music training on EF.
To examine this question, we decided to use a
simple EF paradigm: Go/No-Go. This paradigm is
widely used in the literature and has the advantage
of clearly recruiting a core component of EF: IC.
Moreover, its other advantage is that this task is val-
idated for a wide age range (i.e., can be used across
the life span). Recently, we investigated the brain
mechanism related to IC.38 We used EEG to study
two expert populations, musicians and bilinguals,
and a control group, nonmusician monolinguals.
The current literature suggests that both expert
populations exhibit behavioral advantages on tasks
with high demands on executive functioning (for a
review, see Refs. 1 and 39). Our three groups com-
pleted a visual Go/No-Go task that involved with-
holding of response to rare targets. The visual (as
opposed to auditory) aspect of our task was impor-
tant because it allowed us to interpret our data with-
out the risk of confusion between EF and musician’s
auditory advantage. The three groups performed
similarly (i.e., in terms of error rates and reaction
time), but the analysis of cortical responses revealed
significant differences in the brain neurophysiologi-
cal response. Success in withholding a prepotent re-
sponse (No-go trials) was associated with enhanced
stimulus-locked N2 and P3 wave amplitudes relative
to Go trials. For No-go trials, altered timing-specific
ERP differences and graded amplitude differences
were observed in the neural responses across groups.
Specifically, musicians showed an enhanced early
P2 response accompanied by reduced N2 ampli-
tude. These findings showed that musical expertise
was related to differential effects in IC at the brain
functional level, and this influence was specific to
musical expertise (i.e., not observed in bilingual-
ism). However, these findings were limited by the
inherent correlational design of the experiment.
Following these findings we decided to conduct
an intervention study to investigate the causal re-
lationship between music training and IC.16 We
compared the benefits of a music training pro-
gram for 5-year-old children to those of an equally
149
Music training and inhibitory control
engaging visual arts training program. Before and
after the training, children performed the same
task as our previous adult study, a visual (nonver-
bal) Go/No-Go paradigm while EEG was recorded.
They also participated in two subsets of the Wech-
sler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence
(WPPSI) battery:37 the vocabulary and block tests.
After 4 weeks of training, children in the music train-
ing group showed an improvement in the vocabu-
lary test and were better able to discriminate (i.e.,
D prime) Go from No-go trials than were children
in the visual arts training group. Moreover, after
training, children in the music group had a larger
P2 response (a positive deflection of the ERP peak-
ing at about 200 ms after stimulus) on the No-go
trials than the children in the visual art training,
whereas no changes were seen in the later N2/P3
complex. Another interesting finding was that the
change at the brain functional level in IC was pos-
itively correlated with the change observed in our
verbal task (i.e., WPPSI vocabulary subtest), in-
dicating for the first time the potential role of IC
as a mediating transfer processing. These findings
clearly highlighted two new discoveries. First, they
showed a causal relationship between music train-
ing and IC, and also they indicated that IC seems
to mediate the transfer mechanism between music
training and verbal skills.
After these discoveries we wanted to explore this
inhibitory mechanism in the auditory domain using
the same intervention design but with an auditory
task: passive oddball paradigm.40 This time we com-
pared our music training program for 5-year-old
children to an equally engaging second language
training program (i.e., French). Event-related po-
tentials were recorded for French vowels and mu-
sical notes during the passive oddball paradigm.
The passive oddball paradigm has two major advan-
tages: it is extremely reliable with children of this age
range, and it also offers us a window to study a top-
down regulation mechanism (i.e., IC), evidenced
by the late discriminative negativity (LDN). Indeed,
the literature advanced interpretations of the func-
tional role of LDN reflecting top-down influences
on auditory processing.41–43 Our analyses focused
on changes in the LDN. In our paradigm, chil-
dren were watching a silent movie and sounds (i.e.,
French vowels or music notes) were playing in the
background. They were instructed not to pay atten-
tion to the sounds in the room but to pay attention
150 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1337 (2015) 147–152 
Moreno & Farzan
to the movie as they would be asked several ques-
tions at the end of the movie. This paradigm allowed
us to test both the specific effects of training and the
transfer between music and language processing44
by measuring domain-specific changes (e.g., vowel
condition for the French group, note condition for
the music group) and domain-general changes (e.g.,
note condition for the French group, vowel condi-
tion for the music group) in the brain following the
training. In addition, we examined the top-down
control hypothesis,1 suggesting IC as a medium
for transfer between perceptual and cognitive func-
tions. Following the training both groups showed
enhanced LDN in their trained condition (mu-
sic group—musical notes; French group—French
vowels) and reduced LDN in the untrained condi-
tion. We suggest that these changes reflect improved
processing of relevant (trained) sounds and an in-
creased capacity to inhibit irrelevant (untrained)
sounds. Our findings showed a causal relationship
between music training and the neural processes
underlying the LDN, and they are consistent with
the role of IC acting as a medium for the transfer of
skills in the auditory domain.
This group of findings (in children and young
adults) highlight the important role of IC in trans-
fer of skills. Although we would in no way limit the
definition of transfer processing to IC alone, we be-
lieve that our results and the recent findings in the
literature showing general cognitive benefits after
using an IC training protocol5 validate the need for
further exploring this hypothesis. We believe that
further investigations are necessary to understand
the IC role as one of the central mechanisms of
transfer of skills and that our theoretical framework
facilitates studying this complex question.
Conclusion and future direction
In summary, the aforementioned studies and re-
sults from our own group and others all converge
to strongly support that music training can serve
as a potential solution to improve cognitive abilities
not necessarily directly linked to musicianship. In-
deed, our findings showed that music training could
induce lasting neurophysiological changes. Our re-
search presented above clearly indicates a link be-
tween music training and IC. Even if more studies
are necessary to understand the factors playing a role
in this relationship, our studies in children clearly
showed a causal relationship after a short amount
C 2014 New York Academy of Sciences.
Moreno & Farzan
of training (i.e., 20 days16 ). Our second intervention
study confirmed this finding. Using an oddball task,
we demonstrated that the adaptive changes seen at
the brain functional level could be interpreted as a
top-down regulation mechanism regulating the au-
ditory system. Furthermore, our data showed that
this association continues to exist during adulthood.
Indeed, our correlational studies using young adults
illustrated the functional brain differences between
musicians and nonmusicians in IC processing.
Recently, Moreno and Bidelman proposed a
general framework of music-induced transfer ef-
fects conceptualized as a multidimensional phe-
nomenon in a three-dimensional space: processing
level, nature of the transfer, and executive functions
involvement.1 The authors precisely defined the first
two dimensions as a continuum and showed how
they account for a wide range of studies demon-
strating music-related transfer of skills. However,
the third dimension, inspired by several recent
papers,10,16,33 was only vaguely defined: “the extent
of transfer from music to unrelated skills might be
governed by an umbrella effect: the degree to which
general cognitive abilities (e.g., EFs) are tuned by
musical training itself.” Here, we fine-tuned this the-
ory, inspired by the definition of EFs proposed by
Miyake and Friedman29 and results of our studies,
to further suggest that among EFs, IC may in large
part mediate the music training–related transfer of
skills. Future studies should further investigate the
functional roles of other EF dimensions (i.e., updat-
ing and switching) in musical training programs to
ascertain the contribution of IC compared to other
EF dimensions.
This research opens another clear future direc-
tion: examining the neural mechanisms and brain
networks underlying IC and characterizing the ef-
fect of music training on the brain dynamics of
IC. To investigate this, other neuroimaging tech-
niques that more directly permit assessing corti-
cal excitability, plasticity, and network connectivity
seem appropriate, such as noninvasive brain stim-
ulation modalities including transcranial magnetic
stimulation (TMS) or transcranial electrical stimu-
lation (tES).45,46 Understanding the neural mecha-
nisms subserving the transfer effect will further aid
the field toward designing more direct and optimally
beneficial training programs. We foresee that iden-
tifying these pathways and transfer mechanisms not
only will lead to design of data-driven brain-training
Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1337 (2015) 147–152 
C 2014 New York Academy of Sciences.
Music training and inhibitory control
programs but will also open up new possibilities
in designing targeted and guided noninvasive brain
stimulation programs (e.g., using TMS or tES) to
selectively enhance brain function in both health
and disease across the life span.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the Mariani Foundation for its
ongoing support of the neurosciences and music; the
family and children who were involved in the stud-
ies presented; and Ellen Bialystok, Gavin Bidelman,
William Tays, Yunjo Lee, Aline Moussard, and
Claude Alain for their contributions to the studies
presented. This work was supported by the Min-
istry of Economic Development and Innovation of
Ontario and National Science Engineering Research
Council. This work was also in part supported by the
Temerty Family through the Centre for Addiction
and Mental Health (CAMH) Foundation.
Conflicts of interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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C 2014 New York Academy of Sciences.
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