Thanks to a recent grant from the Dana Foundation, researchers at Dartmouth and several other institutions will soon be studying the correlation between education in the arts and brain development.
Dartmouth has been named the lead institution in the study and will receive $1.8 million over three years in order to perform research that could potentially change the role that arts education plays in schools across America.
Professor Michael Gazzaniga, who recently stepped down from his post as dean of the faculty, will serve as the director of the Dana Arts and Cognition Consortium and will help to coordinate the research performed at the six institutions that comprise the consortium.
"Up till now there have always been good correlations between children who take part in the arts and their academic performance," Gazzaniga said. "Now we hope to see if the relationship is causal. If it is, there will be a strong case for reintroducing the performing arts back into our schools."
A diverse group of individuals ranging in age from four to over 80-years-old will serve as participants in the study. Researchers plan to use a variety of methods to study the subjects, some of which include fMRI scans and other imaging technologies.
The key focus of the study is to determine what effect, if any, an arts education has on cognitive processes and certain regions of the brain. The results of the study could change our understanding of information acquisition and brain function.
Two Dartmouth professors will be directly involved with the research aspect of the study. The first group will be led by education professor Kevin Dunbar and will study college-aged students with varying degrees of arts education. The center of the study will be to see if students with a higher degree of arts education have improved focusing capabilities.
Education professor Laura-Ann Petitto, the head of the second group, will study children and adults who have been bilingual from birth to see whether more extensive arts education helps to broaden their linguistic and reading skills.
The results of the study will not be known for several years, but hopes are high that they will yield a great deal of information that will be useful in understanding brain functions.
"Whatever the findings, we know that the research will help advance the fields of cognitive neuroscience and arts education," President of the Dana Foundation Edward Rover said.
