Any piano player who practices sight-reading for thousands of hours will get pretty good at it, say study coauthors Elizabeth Meinz of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and David Hambrick of Michigan State University in East Lansing. But having a strong ability to keep different pieces of relevant information in mind while performing a task — known as working memory capacity — aids sight-reading regardless of how much someone has practiced, the psychologists report in a paper published online June 9 in Psychological Science.
Working memory appears to be a capacity that gels early in life and can’t be improved much by learning, the study suggests. High scores on working memory tests did not cluster among volunteers who had practiced piano playing and sight-reading the most.
Of course, sight-singing is a little different, and this study only used pianists. And I wonder whether the test pieces were simple Scarlatti sonatinas, or complicated Bach fugues, or dissonant Schönberg works.
Allen H Simon says
John Howell says