Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The purpose of our study was to determine whether activemusical engagement alleviates decline in inhibitory controldue to cognitive aging. Given that musical training in youngadults has been shown to improve attentional performance,we can expect this benefit to persist for older adults as well.With the help of the stop-signal procedure, we measuredresponse inhibition of young and older adults who provided aself-reported assessment of their musical engagement, usingthe recently validated Goldsmiths Musical SophisticationIndex. The Gold-MSI addresses a variety of musical activitiesand thus offers a more comprehensive measure than ability toplay a musical instrument used in the past. Results of theexperiment showed that older participants had longer stop-signal reaction times, independently of their musical trainingand engagement, but musical training and ensemble practicewere negatively related to the proportion of missed responsessuggesting a weak effect of certain types of musical activitieson inhibitory control.