Introspecting on the process of sight-reading, pianist Boris Goldovsky says: I have come to the conclusion that it [sight-reading] has something to do with the speed at which the visual image is converted into a muscular act; and with some people the transformation is so rapid that a great deal of what happens escapes awareness—it just happens. (from Wolf, 1976)
Abstract
We used a novel musical Stroop task to demonstrate that musical notation is automatically processed in trained pianists. Numbers were superimposed onto musical notes, and participants played five-note sequences by mapping from numbers to fingers instead of from notes to fingers. Pianists’ reaction times were significantly affected by the congruence of the note/number pairing. Nonmusicians were unaffected. In a nonmusical analogue of the task, pianists and nonmusicians showed a qualitative difference on performance of a vertical-to-horizontal stimulus-response mapping task. Pianists were faster when stimuli specifying a leftward response were presented in vertically lower locations and stimuli specifying a rightward response were presented in vertically higher locations. Nonmusicians showed the reverse pattern. No group differences were found on a task that required horizontal-to-horizontal mappings. We suggest that, as a result of learning to read and play keyboard music, pianists acquire vertical-to-horizontal visuomotor mappings that generalize outside the musical context.
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This work was supported by Medical Research Council Grant G9617036; UF. V. W. is supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.
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Stewart, L., Walsh, V. & Frith, U. Reading music modifies spatial mapping in pianists. Perception & Psychophysics 66, 183–195 (2004). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194871
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194871