Exploring the Relationship Between Self-Reported Cognitive Preferences and Musical Task Performance Among Grade 11–12 Students

Background: Popular left-brain/right-brain classifications remain common in education despite neuroscientific evidence that individuals cannot be reliably characterized by global hemispheric dominance. Rational–experiential cognitive preferences offer an alternative psychological framework for examining individual differences without assuming anatomical dominance. Objective: To investigate relationships between rational and experiential preferences, rhythm reproduction, and melody creativity among Grade 11–12 students, while comparing conventional Left, Right, and Balanced self-perception categories. Methods: The exploratory cross-sectional analysis comprised 20 students aged 15–17 years. Two ten-item cognitive-preference subscales were scored on five-point response scales. Musical outcomes included rhythm completion time, reproduction errors, and melody creativity ratings. Descriptive statistics, Cronbach's alpha, Spearman correlations, and Kruskal–Wallis comparisons were examined. Results: Mean rational and experiential scores were 2.96 (SD = 0.68) and 3.38 (SD = 0.67), respectively. Internal consistency coefficients were 0.827 and 0.810. Experiential preference showed a negligible, statistically nonsignificant positive correlation with rhythm completion time (ρ = 0.050, p = 0.834), whereas associations between either preference dimension and creativity were not statistically significant. Left-category participants recorded the shortest mean rhythm completion time (27.29 seconds), while Balanced-category participants had the highest mean creativity rating (3.86). Conclusions: The findings illustrate an approach to comparing psychological self-perceptions with task-specific behavioral outcomes without inferring neural dominance. The small convenience sample, unadjusted exploratory tests, and possible confounding factors limit generalizability and causal interpretation.