Research has repeatedly demonstrated that people with experience within a particular domain have exceptional cognitive abilities for domain-specific information. Chess masters, for instance, are far better at memorizing visually presented chess positions than amateurs, and professional American football experts are highly sensitive to semantic changes in domain-related scenes. However, for non-domain-related material, experts’ performance becomes similar to novice performance. But how does this apply to music? We compared experienced musicians’ and novices’ attentional function and visual working memory using the change blindness flicker paradigm. The task was to detect minor changes between two otherwise identical music scores of differing styles: traditional (C-major, regular rhythms), contemporary (atonal, irregular rhythms), and random (nonsense music). We expected that (1) experienced musicians would detect changes faster, (2) the between-group difference would be larger for traditional than contemporary music, and (3) the groups’ performance would be more similar for random music. The experienced musicians detected changes significantly faster in both the contemporary and traditional music material, whereas the difference was nonsignificant for the random condition. The difference between groups was largest for contemporary music, despite its higher level of complexity. We discuss these results in relation to existing literature on expertise in visual information processing.

研究反复表明，在特定领域内有经验的人对于领域特定信息具有非凡的认知能力。例如，国际象棋大师比业余爱好者在记忆视觉呈现的象棋位置方面要好得多，而且职业美式足球专家对领域相关场景中的语义变化非常敏感。但是，对于与领域无关的材料，专家的表现与新手的表现相似。但是，这对音乐有何影响？我们使用变化盲目闪烁范例比较了经验丰富的音乐家和新手的注意功能和视觉工作记忆。任务是检测两种不同风格的本来相同的乐谱之间的微小变化：传统（C大调，常规节奏），当代（节奏，不规则节奏）和随机（胡说八道的音乐）。我们期望（1）经验丰富的音乐家能够更快地检测到变化，（2）传统音乐的群体间差异将比当代音乐大，并且（3）随机音乐的群体表现将更加相似。经验丰富的音乐家在当代和传统音乐资料中都能更快地发现变化，而对于随机条件而言，差异并不明显。尽管复杂程度较高，但对于现代音乐而言，组之间的差异最大。我们将这些结果与有关视觉信息处理专业知识的现有文献进行讨论。