For the children with cognitive deficits, music therapists incorporate music into interventions to enhance diverse cognitive skills including attention, information processing, memory, executive functioning, and academic skills.

 

Attention is the process of focusing on specific information out of existing multiple stimuli, and it is the ground of other cognitive processes.

 

Music combines various timbre, rhythm, pith and melodic patterns which create an attractive auditory stimulus for activating many areas of the brain and captivating the attention of children and adults.

 

Music is also time-based sound production, of which constant yet ever-changing characteristic allows children to sustain their attention as they engage in musical activities. 

 

Music therapists also utilize the musical pattern as an effective mnemonic channel to help children store and retrieve new information. Familiar, simple, and repetitive rhythmic or melodic phrases of music make learning and remembering of new information easier, thus various academic concepts or self-help skills can be learned through the music therapy activities.