There is an increasing interest in the idea that music training might improve non-musical cognitive abilities (Jaschke et al., 2013; Sutcliffe & Ruffman, 2020). Most research relies on comparisons between musicians and non-musicians, though. It remains therefore unclear whether expertise-related differences are driven by the training itself or reflect predispositions (Moreno & Bidelman, 2014). Additionally, the main focus has been on how music training relates to language and domain-general abilities such as IQ (e.g., Moreno et al., 2009; Schellenberg et al., 2004). Whether and how music training affects socio- emotional skills has been poorly explored. We conducted a longitudinal study with 6- to 8-year-old children to examine this question. The study was implemented in a regular school environment, and it included pre-test, training and pos-test phases, in three conditions: an experimental music training condition (Orff-based training, n = 37), an active control condition (basketball training, n = 40), and a passive control condition (no training, n = 33). None of the children had previous experience of formal music or sports training. The training programs were conducted over two school years (2019-2020, 2020-2021), consisted of group activities, and the experimental and active controls groups completed a similar number of training sessions: in the first school year, two sessions per week, lasting 90 minutes each; in the second school year, one session per week, lasting 90 minutes (in total, the groups completed ca. 114 hours of training). The measures covered cognitive, motor, music, and socio-emotional domains. Specifically, the children were assessed before and after training regarding music skills (auditory discrimination of rhythm and melodies, musical memory and rhythm copy), motor skills (fine-motor skills, gross motor skills, and coordination), global cognition (non-verbal reasoning), executive functions (auditory short-term memory, auditory working memory, and visual interference), emotion recognition in auditory (speech prosody, non-verbal vocalizations) and visual modalities (faces), and higher order socio-emotional abilities (empathy, emotion comprehension, and social functioning). Before training, the three groups were similar across measures, and they were also similar in age, sex, laterality (handedness) and socio-economic status. In this talk we will also present longitudinal evidence for the following questions: whether music training was associated with larger improvements in emotion recognition, empathy, emotion comprehension, and social functioning, than those observed in the control groups; and whether these improvements are direct, or rather mediated by improvements in domain-general cognitive abilities, namely non-verbal reasoning, and executive functions. We will additionally examine if individual differences in musical ability before training predict the magnitude of improvements in socio-emotional abilities over time. This study is well placed to elucidate potential associations between music training and socio- emotional abilities in children. The findings might inform debates on the use of music as an intervention tool in clinical and educational settings.

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Cognitive neuroscience,Socio-emotional ability,Music training,Children