Music curriculum is the carrier of spreading art and culture, and it is also the main way to cultivate students’ music appreciation ability. The current research study is mainly focused on the area of generalized cognitive ability in music education, where a total number of 51 individuals was selected in order to conduct the quasi-experimental research for assessing an experimentally developed approach of cultivating the generalized cognitive ability based on perceptual cognition through bodily senses (hearing, vision, smell, and touch). The event-related potentials were used for recording the data through real-time EEG measurements and understanding the processing mechanisms of music working memory during music perception while evaluating the ability of music perception and generalized cognitive ability of the subjects. Significant differences in post-tests between the experimental and control groups have been found in terms of the generalized cognitive ability in music, which implies that the cultivation strategy is better in enhancing such ability of students. In terms of behavioral and electroencephalographic indicators, subjects in the experimental group may have stronger conflict monitoring and motor inhibition abilities in response inhibition tasks.
