At the beginning of their musical education children who chose violin were as good as those who chose piano. The results for adult musicians are shown in Figure 1. Circles are for violin players, stars are for piano players, and crosses mark the results for non-musicians. As expected, the discrimination thresholds are much higher for non-musicians. Much more interesting is the difference between violin players and piano players. They do similarly well as long as the interval between two sounds is not too small. As soon as we come to micro intervals piano players do much worse. To explain these results, Ananiev turns to the specific nature of the subject's musical profession. He argued that piano players work with a «discrete» scale of sounds, with the keyboard, while violin players have to construct the sound each time, as they work with a non-discrete, continuous, scale. That is why the latter professionally use their abilities to discriminate micro intervals and have the relevant perceptual functions stable and in progress, while the former do not have to use these, so that perceptual functions related to micro intervals perception become degraded.
Ananiev and his colleagues have described surprising effects of individualization of the ontogenesis of psycho-physiological functions in the works «Sensory processes» (1961), «Human Sensory-Perceptive Organization» (1982) and others. These works have remained almost unknown up to now to foreign colleagues. At the same time, these works might turn out to be extremely topical today, and their currency only increases along with new successes in the development of biological science.
The idea that physiological explanation of sensory processes and perception is not exhaustive can be heard more and more often from experts on cognitive processes today. It is significant that the main topic of the lecture delivered by Cambridge professor J. D. Mollon at the opening of the 29th European Congress on Visual Perception (ECVP 2006), which brought together psychologists, physiologists and specialists on artificial vision from different countries, – was the discrepancy between the physiology of color perception and the subjective perception of colors, which is manifested ever more strongly with more successful research on physiological mechanisms. «Should we not look for a key to the mystery of color perception outside our body?» (Mollon, 2006), – he asked.