Name:Paula Berry

School/Affiliation:Concordia University

Co-Authors:Maria Psomas, Virgina Penhune

Virtual or In-person:In-person

Short Bio:

Paula is in her fourth year of studies in the Honours Psychology program at Concordia University in Montreal. She has been a volunteer in the Penhune Laboratory for Motor Learning and Neural Plasticity since 2023 and is the recipient of an NSERC Undergraduate Research Award (2025), a Concordia Undergraduate Student Research Award (2024), and an Arts & Science Scholar Award for students in the top 1% at Concordia (2023). Paula graduated from McGill University with a Masters in Voice and Opera Performance and from the University of British Columbia with a Bachelors in Opera Performance. Favourite opera performance credits include Rosalinda in Die Fledermaus and Adina in l'Elisir d'Amore. She is very grateful for the opportunity to be a part of research that incorporates many of her interests!

Abstract:

There is accumulating evidence that musical ability is susceptible to the effects of experience during a sensitive period, and that early trained musicians (< 7 years old) show behavioural and neuroanatomical differences as compared to late trained musicians. Therefore, we will explore if age of start (AoS) of music training impacts performance on melodic and rhythmic discrimination tasks, and on a beat alignment task (CA-BAT). While current results are preliminary and conducted from a convenience pilot sample, a one-way ANOVA indicated that performance on the rhythmic discrimination task was significantly different between groups, F(2, 34) = 3.63, p = 0.04, but that only the difference between early-trained and non-musicians was statistically significant (p = .03). There were no meaningful differences between groups on the melodic discrimination task. As for the CA-BAT, ANOVA indicated that the difference between groups is marginally significant, F(2, 32) = 3.17, p = 0.06, again with only the mean difference between early-trained and non-musicians being statistically significant (p = 0.05). These preliminary results indicate that our tasks are running as expected and that the behaviour between groups is trending in the expected direction. However, the ambiguity in performance on the melody and rhythm tasks raise questions about the mechanisms underlying these abilities. Future directions include testing on a sample of participants of conservatory musicians, and continued analysis by considering additional variables such as working memory scores (WAIS), and various musical experience variables such as years of training, current weekly practice hours, and cumulative lifetime musical experience in order to explore possible influences on musical ability.