Musicians are faster to process hierarchical Navon letters

Several studies have reported an association between music training and enhanced visuo-spatial abilities—for example, musicians have been found to pay greater attention to local details of the visual scene. However, no studies have directly tested whether long-term music training impacts the global-to-local precedence commonly described in literature. We address this issue by comparing the performance of professional musicians and non-musicians in the traditional Navon test, in which it is required to identify large letters (global task) or the small letters composing the larger ones (local task). Our results did not support the idea of musicians having a different global-to-local precedence over non-musicians. However, musicians proved to be faster, without losing accuracy, than non-musicians in both global and local tasks. A control test showed that the two groups did not differ in motor response speed. In agreement with other studies describing an association between music expertise and enhanced cognitive abilities, our results point toward the idea that long-term music training may facilitate the performance in visuo-spatial tasks and, in particular, those tasks that require simultaneous processing of global and local information and inhibiting the irrelevant ones.