Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: The acquisition of skills, such as learning to play a musical instrument, involves various phases that make specific demands on the learner. Knowledge of the cognitive and motor contri- butions during learning phases can be helpful in developing effective and targeted interventions for healthy aging. Eighty-six healthy older participants underwent an extensive cognitive, motoric, and musical test battery. Within one session, one piano-related and one music-independent movement sequence were both learned. We tested the associations between skill performance and cognito-motor abilities with Bayesian mixed models accounting for individual learning rates. Re- sults showed that performance was positively associated with all cognito-motor abilities. Learning a piano-related task was characterized by relatively strong initial associations between perfor- mance and abilities. These associations then weakened considerably before increasing exponen- tially from the second trial onwards, approaching a plateau. Similar performance–ability relation- ships were detected in the course of learning a music-unrelated motor task. Positive perfor- mance–ability associations emphasize the potential of learning new skills to produce positive cognitive and motor transfer effects. Consistent high-performance tasks that demand maximum effort from the participants could be very effective. However, interventions should be sufficiently long so that the transfer potential can be fully exploited.