Musical expertise and cognitive abilities: No advantage for professionals over amateurs

Abstract

Cognitive advantages in musicians are often attributed to far transfer from music training. If this causal interpretation is correct, greater musical expertise should generally predict larger cognitive gains. To test this prediction, we reanalysed data from the Music Ensemble project—a large-scale initiative including 33 laboratories across 15 countries. We compared 608 nonmusicians, 289 amateur musicians, and 352 professional musicians on measures of musical ability, cognition, and personality, controlling for demographic differences. As expected, musical abilities increased with expertise: professionals outperformed amateurs, who outperformed nonmusicians. Cognitive performance, however, showed a different pattern. Only short-term memory (STM) for melodies increased monotonically with expertise. Verbal STM was similar across groups. Other domains revealed nonlinear associations: both musician groups outperformed nonmusicians in visuospatial STM, vocabulary, and executive functions, but professionals did not exceed amateurs in any domain and even performed worse in nonverbal reasoning. Personality also differed: professionals scored higher on open-mindedness than both other groups, but lower on agreeableness than amateurs. Thus, despite superior musical abilities and distinctive personalities, professional musicians showed no cognitive advantage over amateurs. This dissociation questions the assumption that musicians’ cognitive differences stem from training and points to alternative explanations such as selection effects.