Children's Age-Related Intellectual Strategies for Dealing With Musical and Spatial Analogical Tasks

Abstract

The authors of this study sought to determine whether there is an age-related, common level of logic underlying responses to musical and spatial analogical tasks and to characterize these levels of logic in terms of similar intellectual strategies. Children (N = 128) ranging in age from 6.5 to 12.5 years old were individually tested using author-designed Spatial Analogy Tasks (SANTs) and Musical Analogy Tasks (MANTs). Analyses of results indicated that (a) a sequential nature exists in a child's development of musical intellectual strategies; (b) this sequential development in music seems to parallel an age-related sequence in other areas of understanding (i.e., spatial concepts); and (c) a parallel, rather than identical, sequence between musical analogical reasoning and spatial analogical reasoning may be due to the complexity of musical concepts. That is, the musical tasks may have created a conceptual “overload” for this population of subjects.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Case, R . (1985). Intellectual development: Birth to adulthood. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.

Flavell, J. H. (1982). On cognitive development. Child Development, 53, 1–11.

Gardner, H . (1983). Frames of mind. New York: Basic Books.

Hassler, M. , Birbaumer, N. , & Feil, A. (1985). Musical talent and visual-spatial abilities: A longitudinal study. Psychology of Music, 13(2), 99–113.

Karma, K . (1979). Musical, spatial, and verbal abilities. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 59, 50–53.

Karma, K . (1983). Selecting students to music instruction. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 75, 23–32.

Linn, M. C. (1986). Sciences. In R. F. Dillon & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), Cognition and instruction (pp. 155–204). Orlando, FL: Academic Press.

Nelson, D. J. (1987). An interpretation of the Piagetian model in light of the theories of Case. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 92, 23–34.

Pascual-Leone, J . (1969). Cognitive development and cognitive style. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Geneva.

10.

Serafine, M. L. (1986). Music. In R. F. Dillon & R.J. Sternberg (Eds.), Cognition and instruction (pp. 299–341). Orlando, FL: Academic Press.

11.

Siegler, R. S. (1981). Developmental sequences within and between concepts. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 81 (189).

12.

Sternberg, R.J. (1977). Intelligence, information processing, and analogical reasoning: The componential analysis of human abilities. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

13.

Wagner, W. J. (1981). Reasoning by analogy in the young mind. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto.