Interaction Musical Training And Coordination Of Both Hands

A remarkable faculty of humans is the ability to execute tasks that require acomplex predetermined interdigitation of individual movements and to producecoherent actions by coordinating the limbs to achieve a common goal, such asplaying a musical instrument. Although many studies of performance betweenunimanual and bimanual conditions during repetitive movements shows hightemporal coupling between the two hands, reaction times usually differed slightly forthe two hands, even when the two hands were assigned identical movements.During the past few years, music has increasingly been used as a tool for theinvestigation of human cognition and its underlying brain mechanisms. Andmusicians’ performance takes place at an extremely high level of spatiotemporalaccuracy and is a highly complex skill on many dimensions, so they are a useful groupfor the study of neural correlates of extensive long-term training. Musical training haslong-term influence not only on nonmusical cognitive abilities, but also on motorskills of the two hands, even on structural changing and functionally reorganizing ofthe brain.The study explores the interaction between musical training and bimanualcoordination through four experiments. Experiment one uses simple reaction time toexplore bimanual coordination of musicians and non-musicians. Experiment two usesSimon effect paradigm to deeply explore bimanual synchronization of musicians andnon-musicians. Experiment three explores bimanual independence of musicians andnon-musicians through pressing keys with different rhythm of the two hands.Experiment four explores the impacts of bimanual motor skills on instrumentaltraining ability through comparing musical ability and bimanual coordination ofmusicians, athletes and non-musicians.The first three experiments show that musicians perform better on bothsynchronization and independence of the two hands, especially the violinists. Evenunder the influence of the Simon effect and bimanual interference, musicians stillmaintain good bimanual coordination, while non-musicians are interfered obviously. The last experiment shows that long-term training on the two hands of the athletesdo not bring direct increase on musical ability, but athletes perform better onbimanual coordination than non-musicians.The study confirms the positive impact of musical training on bimanualcoordination, and this effect is stable and less susceptible to outside interference.Although bimanual coordination does not bring direct increase on musical ability, ithas positive impact on instrumental training. The results suggest that playing musicalinstrument can bring benefit on motor skills of the two hands. The results also have acertain sense of inspiration and guidance for musical education, especially forinstrumental training.