Musical practice may benefit not only domain-specific abilities, such as pitch discrimination and music performance, but also domain-general abilities, like executive functioning and memory. Behavioral and neural changes in visual processing have been associated with music-reading experience. However, it is still unclear whether there is a domain-specific visual ability to process musical notation. This study investigates the specificity of the visual skills relevant to simple decisions about musical notation. Ninety-six participants varying in music-reading experience answered a short survey to quantify experience with musical notation and completed a test battery that assessed musical notation reading fluency and accuracy at the level of individual note or note sequence. To characterize how this ability may relate to domain-general abilities, we also estimated general intelligence (as measured with the Raven’s Progressive Matrices) and general object-recognition ability (as measure by a recently proposed construct o). We obtained reliable measurements on our various tasks and found evidence for a domain-specific ability of the perception of musical notation. This music-reading ability and domain-general abilities were found to contribute to performance on specific tasks differently, depending on the level of experience reading music.

音乐实践可能不仅有益于特定领域的能力，如音高辨别和音乐表演，而且有益于领域的一般能力，如执行功能和记忆。视觉处理中的行为和神经变化与音乐阅读体验有关。然而，目前尚不清楚是否存在处理乐谱的特定领域视觉能力。本研究调查了与简单的乐谱决策相关的视觉技能的特异性。九十六名不同音乐阅读经验的参与者回答了一项简短的调查，以量化乐谱的经验，并完成了一个测试组，以评估单个音符或音符序列级别的乐谱阅读流畅性和准确性。为了描述这种能力如何与领域通用能力相关，o )。我们获得了对各种任务的可靠测量，并找到了特定领域的乐谱感知能力的证据。发现这种音乐阅读能力和领域通用能力对特定任务的表现有不同的贡献，这取决于阅读音乐的经验水平。