Children with musical training have an advantage when it comes to identifying statistical patterns hidden in both audio and visual cues, a new study conducted by Macquarie University researchers has found.

The results of the study, published in Clinical Neurophysiology, suggest that children with training in a musical instrument also have enhanced statistical learning ability. Statistical learning ability is a process of learning in humans that involves detecting regularities within an environment. For instance, though a reader may not be familiar with every word in a sentence, they can use several statistical regularities to help assess the likelihood of various letter combinations. These regularities are implicitly learnt over time by reading thousands of English sentences.

“We found that children who had some form of musical training also performed better in statistical learning tasks, which indicates that training in auditory tasks, such as learning a musical instrument, may also help kids with their ability to detect patterns”, explained lead author of the study Dr Pragati Mandikal-Vasuki in the published research.

“This [statistical learning ability] is a key building block of learning a language, learning to read and also learning a second language”, she added. “It’s a fundamental ability”.

Researchers used an array of behavioural...