Different mental rotation performance in students of music, sport and education

Abstract

In this study the effect of long-term physical and musical activity on spatial cognitive performance, measured by mental rotation performance, is investigated in detail. Mental rotation performance is the ability to rotate a three-dimensional object using the imagination. Three groups, each consisting of 40 students, and divided by the subjects, music, sports, and education, solved a psychometrical mental rotation task with three-dimensional block figures. The results showed a better mental rotation performance for music and sports students compared to the education students. Furthermore, the well known gender difference favoring males was found for both sports and education students but not for music students.

Introduction

Parents often are advised that having their child learn to play an instrument and participate in consistent physical activity is important for their children's basic development. This recommendation is based on the idea that encouraging children to do these activities can help them to reach their full academic potential. However, what exactly is the positive effect of such additional education? Concerning physical activity, health orientated training verifiably decreases the danger of things such as postural deformity and cardiovascular disease. However, the influence of sports and music on cognitive performance is a topic of debate and there are only a few studies which have investigated this relationship.

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the influence of long-term physical and musical activity on one specific part of cognitive performance, spatial cognition. Spatial abilities are classified into three domains: visualization, orientation, and mental rotation (Linn & Petersen, 1985). Mental rotation is currently the most intensely investigated. It is defined as the ability to imagine how an object would look if rotated away from the plane or depth in which it is actually presented (Shepard & Metzler, 1971). This ability is involved in problem solving (Geary, Saults, Liu, & Hoard, 2000), acquiring mathematical knowledge (Hegarty & Kozhevnikov, 1999), and academic thinking (i.e. Peters, Chisholm, & Laeng, 1995).

In sport science, a meta-analysis found a positive correlation between motor and cognitive performance (Etnier et al., 2006, Etnier et al., 1997). Regarding the influence of listening to music on cognitive abilities, there now seems to be agreement that there is little evidence for a specific effect of listening to a Mozart-sonata on cognitive performance (e.g. Chabris, 1999, Pietschnig et al., 2010) as it was investigated by Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky (1993). However in a study by Schellenberg (2004) the IQ of six-year-old children who took either keyboard lessons or voice lessons and a control group was investigated. Both music groups exhibited greater full scale increases in IQ than the control group.

Until now there are only a few investigations of the influence of physical activity or musical training on mental rotation performance. A study of Jansen, Titze, and Heil (2009) found that juggling training over three months improved mental rotation performance in adults, while there was no improvement demonstrated by the control group which did not have juggling training. Jansen and Pietsch (2010) also found an increased mental rotation performance of participants after they attended a sport class for 45 min. A control group did not improve their spatial performance after listening to a lecture between the two tests. To our knowledge no study exists investigating the influence of musical training on mental rotation performance. Practicing effects on mental rotation are, until now, limited to investigations of the mental rotation performance of students from a BSc program compared to a BA program (Peters, Laeng, Latham, & Jackson, 1995), or with respect to transfer effects from one test version to another one (Peters et al., 1995).

Concerning the relationship between musical education and mental rotation skills, Sluming, Brooks, Howard, Dovnes, and Roberts (2007) have found that musical training can enhance cognitive performance on a three dimensional mental rotation task. These results were found by testing professional orchestral musicians compared to a control group which were matched by age, gender, and intelligence. Using fMRI measurements the authors showed that the musicians had more diffuse neuronal activation, including Broca's area, while solving mental rotations tasks. In addition, a comparison of professional musicians, amateur musicians, and non musicians has indicated a pattern of differences in gray matter distribution of the motor, auditory, and visual–spatial regions of the cortex (Gaser & Schlaug, 2003). Zatorre, Halpern, and Bouffard (2010) showed that the intraparietal sulcus is activated when musicians are asked to mentally reverse imagined melodies. They hypothesized that this region is involved in both visual and auditory mental rotation. In addition to these findings, researchers in neuroscience have shown that after juggling training there is an increase in gray matter densities in the intraparietal sulcus (Draganski et al., 2004), which is one of the activated regions of the brain during a mental rotation task (Jordan et al., 2001, Jordan et al., 2002).

The main goal of this paper is to investigate if young adults, who have had long-term intensive training in sports or music but who are still not professionals, as in the study of Sluming et al. (2007), show superior development in their mental rotation ability compared to a control group comprised students who have not had extensive sports or musical training. It is assumed that motor and visual–spatial cognitive abilities are enhanced by intensive musical or athletic training. High levels of training might also lead to structural brain changes (i.e. Hyde et al., 2009). Due to the well known gender differences in mental rotation performance (i.e., Peters et al., 1995), gender was considered as a factor. To investigate these possible differences the amount of musical and sports activity was recorded for all students as well as the speed of cognitive processing, which correlates highly with intelligence.