CEN Online Vortrag: Miriam Mosing – Music as a Model for Skill Learning: Insights from Twin and Genetic Studies

Music as a Model for Skill Learning: Insights from Twin and Genetic Studies

Music is a universal, yet individuals differ widely in their musical interests, engagement, and abilities. While early research emphasized environmental influences, genetic approaches have recently shed new light on the biological underpinnings of musical traits and skill learning more broadly. In this talk, I will focus on one of my three main research tracks and present work using music as a model for studying skill acquisition, drawing on twin and genotype data. I will illustrate how genetically informative designs can go beyond heritability and gene discovery to test causal hypotheses, and reveal gene–environment interactions and correlations. Our findings demonstrate the potential of music as a powerful domain for understanding human culture and learning in general and highlight the value of different genetically informative research designs.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Miriam Mosing is leading the Behavior Genetics Unit at the Cognitive Neuropsychology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt and an Associate Professor and Docent at the Department of Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. Dr. Mosing also is an honourable Develop Research Momentum (DRM) Fellow at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Dr. Mosing's group investigates (1) expertise development (using music as a model behaviour), (2) the relationship between cultural engagement and health, and (3) factors related to quality of life throughout lifetime, using interdisciplinary approaches to quantify the interplay between genes and the environment. She is involved in a range of international consortia exploring genetic factors underlying complex traits, including the Interplay of Genes and Environment across Multiple Studies (IGEMS) consortium, and the Musicality Genomics Consortium among others. She also is among the founding members of the first German twin registry (GerTRuD).

Dr. Mosing is a behavioural geneticist who completed her (under)graduate training in Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. She conducted her PhD research on the genetics of complex behaviour, with a particular focus on Quality of Life and health in the second half of life at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and the University of Queensland, Australia.

Join online via Webex:

https://mpib-berlin.webex.com/mpib-berlin/j.php?MTID=maff3dee0ad54cb921191ff33d0b92347

Meeting number: 2744 645 6180

Password: ArpQMePJ352