From childhood to adulthood, musicians show small but reliable advantages in sustained attention

Learning a musical instrument may sharpen attention and vigilance from childhood through adulthood, according to new research published in the British Journal of Psychology.

Researchers have long debated whether mentally demanding activities—such as playing chess, learning a language, or practising a musical instrument—can enhance general cognitive abilities, such as attention and vigilance, which naturally develop with age. Musical training has been seen as a promising candidate because it requires sustained focus, complex coordination, and multitasking.

However, much of the earlier evidence comparing musicians and non-musicians is difficult to interpret. These groups often differ in background factors like education, socioeconomic status, and personality, making it difficult to determine whether observed differences can be attributed to musical training itself, or instead reflect the pre‑existing characteristics of individuals who are more likely to pursue music.

A research team led by Rafael Román-Caballero of the University of Granada in Spain sought to address this selection bias. The scientists recruited 420 participants between the ages of 8 and 34, drawing from two independent groups—one of Spanish children and adolescents, and one of university-age adults.

Using a rigorous statistical method, the researchers paired each musician with a non-musician who closely matched them on a broad range of personal characteristics, including socioeconomic background, physical activity, video game habits, cognitive hobbies, and personality traits. After filtering the data, they were left with a final sample of 268 perfectly matched participants.

Free daily newsletter

Participants completed a computerized attention task called the ANTI-Vea, which measures several distinct aspects of attention. Most notably, it measures “executive vigilance” (how well a person detects rare events buried among distracting information) and “arousal vigilance” (the ability to sustain alertness and react quickly to sudden stimuli over long periods).

The findings revealed consistent advantages for musically trained individuals across nearly every measure tested. Regardless of their age, musicians responded roughly 36 milliseconds faster on average than their non-musician counterparts—a small but reliable difference that held across the entire age range studied. They were also less prone to lapses in attention—often described as “zoning out”—and showed more stable response times on tasks designed to assess sustained vigilance.

Because the researchers studied a wide age range, they noticed two distinct patterns in how these advantages developed. First, they observed a “threshold effect”; some advantages (like faster reaction times) were present even in the youngest 8-year-old musicians, suggesting that simply starting music lessons and reaching a certain threshold of practice might boost attention.

Second, they observed a “dosage effect,” where some advantages grew more pronounced with age. For example, the ability to filter out irrelevant distracting information—a skill known as executive control—demonstrated a more rapid improvement across the teenage years and into adulthood among those with musical training. This suggests that longer exposure to music may compound its benefits over time.

Román-Caballero and team concluded that their study “provides new evidence that formal musical training is associated with superior attention and vigilance across development. The thorough control of confounding variables in the design was intended to provide a closer estimate of the differences between musicians and nonmusicians in isolation from other factors.”

The researchers caution, however, that the observed effects were relatively small and more modest than those reported in earlier, less rigorously controlled studies. Moreover, because the research measured only a single point in time, rather than following the same individuals over many years, it cannot establish a definitive causal relationship between musical training and attentional advantages.

The study, “Attention and vigilance advantages related to formal musical training across childhood, adolescence and young adulthood,” was authored by Rafael Román-Caballero, Laura Trujillo, Paulina del Carmen Martín-Sánchez, Elisa Martín-Arévalo, and Juan Lupiáñez.