Video game players show enhanced brain activity, decision-making skill study

Frequent players of video games show superior sensorimotor decision-making skills and enhanced activity in key regions of the brain as compared to non-players, according to a recent study by Georgia State University researchers.

The authors, who used functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) in the study, said the findings suggest that video games could be a useful tool for training in perceptual decision-making.

"Video games are played by the overwhelming majority of our youth more than three hours every week, but the beneficial effects on decision-making abilities and the brain are not exactly known," said lead researcher Mukesh Dhamala, associate professor in Georgia State's Department of Physics and Astronomy and the university's Neuroscience Institute.

"Our work provides some answers on that," Dhamala said. "Video game playing can effectively be used for training -- for example, decision-making efficiency training and therapeutic interventions -- once the relevant brain networks are identified."

Dhamala was the adviser for Tim Jordan, the lead author of the paper, who offered a personal example of how such research could inform the use of video games for training the brain.

Jordan, who received a Ph.D. in physics and astronomy from Georgia State in 2021, had weak vision in one eye as a child. As part of a research study when he was about 5, he was asked to cover his good eye and play video games as a way to strengthen the vision in the weak one. Jordan credits video game training with helping him go from legally blind in one eye to building strong capacity for visual processing, allowing him to eventually play lacrosse and paintball. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA.

The Georgia State research project involved 47 college-age participants, with 28 categorized as regular video game players and 19 as non-players.

The subjects laid inside an FMRI machine with a mirror that allowed them to see a cue immediately followed by a display of moving dots. Participants were asked to press a button in their right or left hand to indicate the direction the dots were moving, or resist pressing either button if there was no directional movement.

The study found that video game players were faster and more accurate with their responses.

Analysis of the resulting brain scans found that the differences were correlated with enhanced activity in certain parts of the brain.

"These results indicate that video game playing potentially enhances several of the subprocesses for sensation, perception and mapping to action to improve decision-making skills," the authors wrote. "These findings begin to illuminate how video game playing alters the brain in order to improve task performance and their potential implications for increasing task-specific activity."

The study also notes there was no trade-off between speed and accuracy of response -- the video game players were better on both measures.

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Skydiving salamanders live in world's tallest trees

Salamanders that live their entire lives in the crowns of the world's tallest trees, California's coast redwoods, have evolved a behavior well-adapted to the dangers of falling from high places: the ability to parachute, glide and maneuver in mid-air.

Flying squirrels, not to mention numerous species of gliding frogs, geckos, and ants and other insects, are known to use similar aerial maneuvers when jumping from tree to tree or when falling, so as to remain in the trees and avoid landing on the ground.

Similarly, the researchers suspect that this salamander's skydiving skills are a way to steer back to a tree it's fallen or jumped from, the better to avoid terrestrial predators.

"While they're parachuting, they have an exquisite amount of maneuverable control," said Christian Brown, a doctoral candidate at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa and first author of a paper about these behaviors. "They are able to turn. They are able to flip themselves over if they go upside down. They're able to maintain that skydiving posture and kind of pump their tail up and down to make horizontal maneuvers. The level of control is just impressive."

The aerial dexterity of the so-called wandering salamander (Aneides vagrans) was revealed by high-speed video footage taken in a wind tunnel at the University of California, Berkeley, where the salamanders were nudged off a perch into an upward moving column of air simulating free fall.

"What struck me when I first saw the videos is that they (the salamanders) are so smooth -- there's no discontinuity or noise in their motions, they're just totally surfing in the air," said Robert Dudley, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and an expert on animal flight. "That, to me, implies that this behavior is something deeply embedded in their motor response, that it (falling) must happen at reasonably high frequencies so as to effect selection on this behavior. And it's not just passive parachuting, they're not just skydiving downwards. They're also clearly doing the lateral motion, as well, which is what we would call gliding."

The behavior is all the more surprising because the salamanders, aside from having slightly larger foot pads, look no different from other salamanders that aren't aerially maneuverable. They have no skin flaps, for example, that would tip you off to their parachuting ability.

"Wandering salamanders have big feet, they have long legs, they have active tails. All of these things lend themselves to aerial behaviors. But everybody just assumed that was for climbing, because that's what they use those features for when we're looking at them," Brown said. "So, it's not really a dedicated aerodynamic control surface, but it functions as both. It helps them climb, and it seems to help them parachute and glide, as well."

Among the questions the researchers hope to answer in future research are how salamanders manage to parachute and maneuver without obvious anatomical adaptations to gliding and whether many other animals with similar aerial skills have never been noticed before.

"Salamanders are sluggish, you don't think of them as having particularly fast reflexes. It's life in the slow lane. And flight control is all about rapid response to dynamic visual cues and being able to target and orient and change your body position," Dudley said. "So, it's just kind of odd. How often can this be happening, anyway, and how would we know?"

Life in the canopy

Using the wind tunnel, Brown and UC Berkeley graduate student Erik Sathe compared the gliding and parachuting behavior of A. vagrans -- adults are about 4 inches (10 centimeters) from snout to tip of tail -- with the abilities of three other salamander species native to Northern California, each with varying degrees of arboreality -- that is, the propensity to climb or live in trees. The wandering salamander, which probably spends its entire life in a single tree, moving up and down but never touching the ground, was the most proficient skydiver. A related species, the so-called arboreal salamander, A. lugubris, which lives in shorter trees, such as oaks, was nearly as effective at parachuting and gliding.

Two of the least arboreal salamanders -- Ensatina eschscholtzii, a forest floor-dwelling salamander, and A. flavipunctatus, the speckled black salamander, which occasionally climbs trees -- essentially flailed ineffectively for the few seconds they were airborne in the wind tunnel. All four species are plethodontid, or lungless, salamanders, the largest family of salamanders and mostly found in the Western Hemisphere.

"The two least arboreal species flail around a lot. We call it ineffective, undulating motion because they don't glide, they don't move horizontally, they just kind of hover in the wind tunnel freaking out," Brown said. "The two most arboreal species never actually flailed."

Brown encountered these salamanders while working in California's Humboldt and Del Norte counties with nonprofit and university conservation groups that mark and track the animals that live in the redwood canopy, primarily in old growth forest some 150 feet off the ground. Using ropes and ascenders, the biologists regularly climb the redwoods -- the tallest of which rise to a height of 380 feet -- to capture and mark wandering salamanders. Over the past 20 years, as part of a project led by James Campbell-Spickler, now director of the Sequoia Park Zoo in Eureka, the researchers discovered that most of their marked salamanders could be found in the same tree year after year, although at different heights. They live primarily in fern mats growing in the duff, the decaying vegetable matter that collects in the junctions of large branches. Brown said that few marked wandering salamanders from the redwood canopy have been found on the ground, and most of those were found dead.

Brown noticed, when picking them up to mark them, that the salamanders were quick to leap out of his hands. Even a light tap on a branch or a shadow passing nearby were enough to get them to jump from the redwood canopy. Given their location high above the forest floor, their nonchalant leaps into thin air were surprising.

"They jump, and before they've even finished toeing off, they've got their forelimbs splayed out, and they're ready to go," he said. "So, the jump and the parachute are very closely tied together. They assume the position immediately."

When he approached Dudley, who has studied such behavior in other animals, he invited Brown to bring some of the salamanders into his wind tunnel to record their behavior. Using a high-speed video camera shooting at 400 frames per second, Brown and Sathe filmed the salamanders for as long as they floated on the column of air, sometimes up to 10 seconds.

They then analyzed the frames to determine the animals' midair posture and to deduce how they used their legs, bodies and tails to maneuver. They typically fell at a steep angle, only 5 degrees from vertical, but based on the distances between branches in the crowns of redwoods, this would usually be sufficient for them to reach a branch or trunk before they hit the ground. Parachuting reduced their free-fall speed by about 10%.

Brown suspects that their aerial skills evolved to deal with falls, but have become part of their behavioral repertoire and perhaps their default method of descent. He and USF undergraduate Jessalyn Aretz found, for example, that walking downward was much harder for the salamander than walking on a horizontal branch or up a trunk.

"That suggests that when they're wandering, they're likely walking on flat surfaces, or they're walking upward. And when they run out of habitat, as the upper canopy becomes drier and drier, and there's nothing else for them up there, they could just drop back down to those better habitats," he said. "Why walk back down? You're already probably exhausted. You've burned all your energy, you're a little 5 gram salamander, and you've just climbed the tallest tree on Earth. You're not going to turn around and walk down -- you're going to take the gravity elevator."

Brown sees A. vagrans as another poster child for old growth forests that is akin to the spotted owl because it is found primarily in the crowns of the tallest and oldest redwoods, although also in Douglas fir and Sitka spruce.

"This salamander is a poster child for the part of the redwoods that was almost completely lost to logging -- the canopy world. It is not there in these new-growth forests created by logging companies," he said. "Perhaps it would help not just efforts in conserving redwoods, but restoring redwoods, so that we could actually get canopy ecosystems. Restoring redwoods to the point of fern mats, to the point of salamanders in the canopy -- that would be a new bar for conservation."

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Higher education and language skills may help ward off dementia

New research has found that people with mild cognitive impairment may not inevitably develop dementia and, in fact, having higher education and advanced language skills more than doubles their chances of returning to normal.

The study, led by researchers at the University of Waterloo, may reassure those with mild cognitive impairment as it contradicts a common assumption that the condition is simply an early stage of dementia. People with mild cognitive impairment show signs of cognitive decline, but not enough to prevent them from performing typical daily tasks. They have been considered at higher risk of progressing to the more severe cognitive decline seen in dementia.

"Possessing high cognitive reserve -- based on education, high academic grades, and written language skills -- may predict what happens years after someone receives a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment," said Suzanne Tyas, a professor in the School of Public Health Sciences at Waterloo and lead author. "Even after considering age and genetics -- established risk factors for dementia -- we found that higher levels of education more than doubled the chances that people with mild cognitive impairment would return to normal cognition instead of progressing to dementia."

The study also found that language skills, whether reflected in high grades in English in school or in strong writing that was grammatically complex and full of ideas, were also protective.

The researchers discovered that almost one-third of 472 women diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment reverted to normal cognition at least once over an average of eight-and-a-half years following their diagnosis, with more than 80 per cent of them never developing dementia.

Almost another third of the total number progressed to dementia without ever reverting to normal cognition, while three per cent stayed in the mild cognitive impairment stage, and 36 per cent died. None of the participants reverted from dementia to mild cognitive impairment.

The researchers also highlighted that reverse transitions are much more common than progressing to dementia in relatively younger individuals who didn't carry a certain genetic risk factor and had high levels of education and language skills.

"We can't do much about age and genetics, so it's encouraging that our findings show that there are other ways to reduce the risk of dementia, such as building cognitive reserve through education and language skills earlier in life," Tyas said.

The study's findings have implications for treatment and research in people with mild cognitive impairment.

"If individuals with higher cognitive reserve are more likely to improve even without treatment, then this needs to be taken into consideration when recruiting participants for clinical trials of prospective treatments and when interpreting the results of these trials," Tyas said, adding there's no cure for most causes of dementia, so prevention is key.

For the analysis, researchers used complex modelling with data drawn from a longitudinal study called the Nun Study, which looked at older, highly educated religious sisters. The participants were mostly homogeneous, with similar socioeconomic status and marital and reproductive history, strengthening the conclusions of this work.

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Improving reading skills through action video games

Decoding letters into sound is a key point in learning to read but is not enough to master it. "Reading calls upon several other essential mechanisms that we don't necessarily think about, such as knowing how to move our eyes on the page or how to use our working memory to link words together in a coherent sentence," points out Daphné Bavelier, a professor in the Psychology Section of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (FPSE) at the UNIGE. "These other skills, such as vision, the deployment of attention, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, are known to be improved by action video games," explains Angela Pasqualotto, first author of this study, which is based on her PhD thesis at the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science of the University of Trento under the direction of Professors Venuti and De Angeli.

A child-friendly action video game to support learning

With this in mind, a video game was designed that combines action video games with mini games that train different executive functions, such as working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility, functions that are called upon during reading. "The universe of this game is an alternative world in which the child, accompanied by his Raku, a flying creature, must carry out different missions to save planets and progress in the game," Angela Pasqualotto adds. The idea is to reproduce the components of an action game, without incorporating violence, so that it is suitable for young children. "For example, the Raku flies through a meteor shower, moving around to avoid those or aiming at them to weaken their impact, while collecting useful resources for the rest of the game, a bit like what you find in action video games."

The scientists then worked with 150 Italian schoolchildren aged 8 to 12, divided into two groups: the first one played the video game developed by the team, and the second one played Scratch, a game that teaches children how to code. Both games require attentional control and executive functions, but in different manners. The action video game requires children to perform tasks within a time limit such as remembering a sequence of symbols or responding only when the Raku makes a specific sound while increasing the difficulty of these tasks according to the child's performance. Scratch, the control game, requires planning, reasoning and problem solving. Children must manipulate objects and logical structures to establish the desired programming sequence.

"First, we tested the children's ability to read words, non-words and paragraphs, and also we conducted an attention test that measures the child's attentional control, a capacity we know is trained by action video games," explains Daphne Bavelier. The children then followed the training with either the action video game or the control game, for six weeks, two hours a week under supervision at school. Children were tested at school by clinicians of the Laboratory of Observation Diagnosis and Education (UNITN).

Long-term improvement in reading skills

Shortly after the end of the training, the scientists repeated the tests on both groups of children. "We found a 7-fold improvement in attentional control in the children who played the action video game compared to the control group," says Angela Pasqualotto. Even more remarkably, the research team observed a clear enhancement in reading, not only in terms of reading speed, but also in accuracy, whereas no improvement was noted for the control group. This improvement in literacy occurs even though the action video game does not require any reading activity.

"What is particularly interesting about this study is that we carried out three further assessment tests at 6 months, 12 months and 18 months after training. On each occasion, the trained children performed better than the control group, which proves that these improvements were sustained," Angela Pasqualotto says. Moreover, the grades in Italian of the trained children became significantly better over time, showing a virtuous improvement in learning ability. "The effects are thus long-term, in line with the action video game strengthening the ability to learn how to learn," says Daphne Bavelier.

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When it comes to communication skills, maybe we’re born with it?

From inside the womb and as soon as they enter the world, babies absorb information from their environment and the adults around them, quickly learning after birth how to start communicating through cries, sounds, giggles, and other kinds of baby talk. But are a child's long-term language skills shaped by how their brain develops during infancy, and how much of their language development is influenced by their environment and upbringing?

Following dozens of children over the course of five years, a Boston University researcher has taken the closest look yet at the link between how babies' brains are structured in infancy and their ability to learn a language at a young age, and to what degree their environment plays a role in brain and language development.

The new research, described in a paper published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, finds that the brain's organizational pathways might set a foundation for a child's language learning abilities within the first year of life. These pathways are known as white matter, and they act as the connectors between the billions of neurons -- called gray matter -- that comprise the brain tissue. This allows for the exchange of signals and for all of the different tasks and functions we need to perform, as well as all of the biological processes that sustain us.

"A helpful metaphor often used is: white matter pathways are the 'highways,' and gray matter areas are the 'destinations'," says BU neuroscientist and licensed speech pathologist Jennifer Zuk, who led the study. Zuk, a College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College assistant professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences, says the more someone does a certain task, like learning a new language, the stronger and more refined the pathways become in the areas of the brain responsible for that task, allowing information to flow more efficiently through the white matter highways. Recent evidence suggests that white matter most rapidly develops within the first two years of life, according to Zuk.

In addition to white matter development, scientists have long known that the environment also plays an important role in shaping a person's language abilities, Zuk says. But many uncertainties remain about whether nature or nurture is more dominant in determining the makeup of white matter and how well a baby learns to communicate.

In their study, Zuk says, she and her colleagues sought answers to several specific questions: from very early on, to what extent does predisposed brain structure play a role in development? Does the brain develop in tandem with language, and is the environment ultimately driving the progress of both? And to what extent does brain structure in early infancy set children up for success with language?

To investigate this, Zuk and Boston Children's Hospital researcher and study senior author Nadine Gaab met with 40 families with babies to take images of the infants' brains using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and gather first-of-its-kind data on white matter development. No small feat, considering the babies needed to be sound asleep to allow for crisp capture of their brain activity and structure using MRI.

"It was such a fun process, and also one that calls for a lot of patience and perseverance," says Zuk, who had to master the challenge of getting 4-to-18-month-old babies comfortable enough to snooze through the MRI process -- the loud sounds of an MRI could be very disruptive to a sleeping baby. "There are very few researchers in the world using this approach," she says, "because the MRI itself involves a rather noisy background…and having infants in a naturally deep sleep is very helpful in accomplishing this pretty crazy feat."

It's also the first time that scientists have used MRI to look at the relationship between brain structure and language development in full-term, typically developing children from infancy to school age.

One important white matter pathway the researchers looked at using MRI is called the arcuate fasciculus, which connects two regions of the brain responsible for language production and comprehension. Using MRI, the researchers measured the organization of white matter by looking at how easily water diffuses through the tissue, indicating the pathway's density.

Five years after first rocking babies to sleep and gently tucking them inside an MRI machine, Zuk and her collaborators met up with the children and their families again to assess each child's emerging language abilities. Their assessments tested each one's vocabulary knowledge, their ability to identify sounds within individual words, and their ability to blend individual sounds together to understand the word it makes.

According to their findings, children born with higher indications of white matter organization had better language skills five years later, suggesting that communication skills could be strongly linked to predisposed brain structure. But, Zuk says, this is only the first piece of a very complicated puzzle.

"Perhaps the individual differences in white matter we observed in infancy might be shaped by some combination of a child's genetics and their environment," she says. "But it is intriguing to think about what specific factors might set children up with more effective white matter organization early on."

Although their findings indicate a foundation for language is established in infancy, "ongoing experience and exposure [to language] then builds upon this foundation to support a child's ultimate outcomes," Zuk says.

She says this means that during the first year of a child's life "there's a real opportunity for more environmental exposure [to language] and to set children up for success in the long term."

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Taking short breaks may help our brains learn new skills

In a study of healthy volunteers, National Institutes of Health researchers have mapped out the brain activity that flows when we learn a new skill, such as playing a new song on the piano, and discovered why taking short breaks from practice is a key to learning. The researchers found that during rest the volunteers' brains rapidly and repeatedly replayed faster versions of the activity seen while they practiced typing a code. The more a volunteer replayed the activity the better they performed during subsequent practice sessions, suggesting rest strengthened memories.

"Our results support the idea that wakeful rest plays just as important a role as practice in learning a new skill. It appears to be the period when our brains compress and consolidate memories of what we just practiced," said Leonardo G. Cohen, M.D., senior investigator at the NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the senior author of the study published in Cell Reports. "Understanding this role of neural replay may not only help shape how we learn new skills but also how we help patients recover skills lost after neurological injury like stroke."

The study was conducted at the NIH Clinical Center. Dr. Cohen's team used a highly sensitive scanning technique, called magnetoencephalography, to record the brain waves of 33 healthy, right-handed volunteers as they learned to type a five-digit test code with their left hands. The subjects sat in a chair and under the scanner's long, cone-shaped cap. An experiment began when a subject was shown the code "41234" on a screen and asked to type it out as many times as possible for 10 seconds and then take a 10 second break. Subjects were asked to repeat this cycle of alternating practice and rest sessions a total of 35 times.

During the first few trials, the speed at which subjects correctly typed the code improved dramatically and then leveled off around the 11th cycle. In a previous study, led by former NIH postdoctoral fellow Marlene Bönstrup, M.D., Dr. Cohen's team showed that most of these gains happened during short rests, and not when the subjects were typing. Moreover, the gains were greater than those made after a night's sleep and were correlated with a decrease in the size of brain waves, called beta rhythms. In this new report, the researchers searched for something different in the subjects' brain waves.

"We wanted to explore the mechanisms behind memory strengthening seen during wakeful rest. Several forms of memory appear to rely on the replaying of neural activity, so we decided to test this idea out for procedural skill learning," said Ethan R. Buch, Ph.D., a staff scientist on Dr. Cohen's team and leader of the study.

To do this, Leonardo Claudino, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Cohen's lab, helped Dr. Buch develop a computer program which allowed the team to decipher the brain wave activity associated with typing each number in the test code.

The program helped them discover that a much faster version -- about 20 times faster -- of the brain activity seen during typing was replayed during the rest periods. Over the course of the first eleven practice trials, these compressed versions of the activity were replayed many times -- about 25 times -- per rest period. This was two to three times more often than the activity seen during later rest periods or after the experiments had ended.

Interestingly, they found that the frequency of replay during rest predicted memory strengthening. In other words, the subjects whose brains replayed the typing activity more often showed greater jumps in performance after each trial than those who replayed it less often.

"During the early part of the learning curve we saw that wakeful rest replay was compressed in time, frequent, and a good predictor of variability in learning a new skill across individuals," said Dr. Buch. "This suggests that during wakeful rest the brain binds together the memories required to learn a new skill."

As expected, the team discovered that the replay activity often happened in the sensorimotor regions of the brain, which are responsible for controlling movements. However, they also saw activity in other brain regions, namely the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex.

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Infants' language skills more advanced than first words suggest

 Babies can recognise combinations of words even before they have uttered their first word, a study suggests, challenging ideas of how children learn language.

Assessments in 11-12 month-olds show that infants at the cusp of talking are already processing multiword phrases such as 'clap your hands'.

Researchers say the study is the first to provide evidence that young children can pick up and understand multiword sequences before they can talk or begin producing such combinations themselves.

The findings suggest that babies learn individual words and more complex phrases at the same time, which challenges the perspective that they progress from single words to phrases and sentences, experts say.

It may also explain why adults who learn a new language in later life by focusing on individual words often do not achieve native-like proficiency.

Linguists at the University of Edinburgh assessed 36 infants' language learning behaviour in a series of attention tests using recorded adult speech.

They looked at how the babies responded to multiword combinations of three-word sequences used in parent-child conversations.

The researchers compared the infants' responses using a testing method called central fixation, which measures infants' looking behaviour in response to sounds.

They assessed if the babies could distinguish more frequently used three-word sequences such as 'clap your hands' from similar but less common phrases such as 'take your hands'.

On average, fixation times were longer for the frequently used phrases. This pattern was found in 23 of the 36 infants.

Researchers say this suggests babies who are still learning their first words are simultaneously learning word combinations.

This development happens months before parents hear their children's first attempts at sequences of words, experts say.

Dr Barbora Skarabela, of the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Languages Sciences, said: "Previous research has shown that young infants recognise many common words. But this is the first study that shows that infants extract and store more than just single words from everyday speech. This suggests that when children learn language, they build on linguistic units of varying sizes, including multiword sequences, and not just single words as we often assume. This may explain why adults learning a second language, who tend to rely on individual words, often fall short of reaching native-like proficiency in the way they string words together into phrases and sentences."

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Why an early start is key to developing musical skill later in life

 Among the many holiday traditions scuttled by pandemic restrictions this year are live concerts featuring skilled musicians. These gifted performers can often play with such ease that it is easy to underestimate the countless hours of practice that went into honing their craft.

But could there be more to mastering music? Is there, as some have suggested, a developmental period early in life when the brain is especially receptive to musical training? The answer, according to new research published in the journal Psychological Science, is probably not.

"It is a common observation that successful musicians often start their musical training early," said Laura Wesseldijk, a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and first author on the paper. "One much-discussed explanation is that there may be a period in early childhood during which the brain is particularly susceptible to musical stimulation. We found, however, that the explanation to why an early start matters may be more complicated and interesting than previously believed."

While the new study supports the idea that an early start is associated with higher levels of musical skills and achievement in adulthood, the underlying reasons for this may have more to do with familial influences -- such as genetic factors and an encouraging musical family environment -- along with accumulating more total practice time than those who start later in life.

To untangle these effects, Wesseldijk and her colleagues recruited 310 professional musicians from various Swedish music institutions, such as orchestral and music schools. The researchers also used data from an existing research project, the Study of Twin Adults: Genes and Environment (STAGE). Participants from both studies were tested on musical aptitude and achievement. They also answered a series of questions that gauged how often they practiced and the age of onset of musical training. The STAGE data also provided genetic information on its participants.

By comparing the results from these two independent studies, the researchers were able to show that an earlier start age is associated with musical aptitude, both in amateurs and professional musicians, even after controlling for accumulated practice time. They then evaluated starting age in a manner that accounted for the genetic data from the STAGE study.

The results indicate that genetic factors -- possibly related to musical interest and talent -- have a substantial influence on the age individuals start music practice and their future musical aptitude. When controlling for familial factors, namely shared genetic and environmental influences, such as a home environment that is steeped in music, there was no additional association between an earlier start age and musicality.

A possible explanation for these results could be that children who display more talent in a particular field, such as music, are encouraged to start practicing earlier. Another possibility is that a musically active, interested, and talented family provides a musical environment for the child, while also passing on their genetic predispositions to engage in music.

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