My primary research subject is music sight-reading. Sight-reading, which refers to reading and playing music at first sight without prior rehearsal, is both a hallmark of performers' outstanding musical talents and a fundamental skill that all musicians should acquire. I am particularly interested in individual differences in sight-reading abilities. Interestingly, professional pianists, despite their advanced musicality and technical expertise, exhibit substantial variations in their sight-reading proficiency. I study the origins of this variability, the balance between domain-general cognitive abilities and domain-specific skills, and their interplay.

 

During my undergraduate and graduate studies at Seoul National University, I studied individual differences in sight-reading proficiency and their underlying mechanisms through the lens of eye-hand span. Eye-hand span, the distance between a performer's fixation and execution of a note, shows how long visual information is stored in a buffer before serving as an output via finger movements. I investigated the interrelations between eye-hand span, sight-reading proficiency, and musical complexity and found that, contrary to the traditional view of eye-hand span being regarded as a decisive indicator of performers' sight-reading competence, proficient sight-readers are performers who are skilled at adjusting their eye-hand span flexibly in response to the characteristics of music instead of always maintaining an extended span. My findings reveal a shift in understanding the eye-hand span not as merely proportional to sight-reading abilities but rather as a dynamic cognitive strategy moderated by musical context.

 

Related article: 

Lim, Y., Park, J. M., Rhyu, S. Y., Chung, C. K., Kim, Y., & Yi, S. W. (2019). Eye-hand span is not an indicator of but a strategy for proficient sight-reading in piano performance. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 17906. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-54364-y

 

As a Ph.D. student in Cognitive Science, my research continues to explore sight-reading while expanding into broader cognitive capacities. While individual differences remain a central interest, I now aim to utilize sight-reading as a window into understanding complex cognitive processes. Sight-reading provides an ideal framework for studying human cognition as it integrates multiple cognitive functions—from perception and memory to action and prediction—all operating under strict temporal constraints. My current research draws on theories of syntactic processing in language and predictive coding to investigate how musicians comprehend and anticipate musical structures during sight-reading. Through behavioral and EEG experiments, I examine how expert musicians process musical information visually and make real-time predictions, offering insights into fundamental cognitive mechanisms that support complex skill acquisition.