Abstract
Our sensory systems provide complementary information about the multimodal objects and events that are the target of perception in everyday life. Professional musicians’ specialization in the auditory domain is reflected in the morphology of their brains, which has distinctive characteristics, particularly in areas related to auditory and audio-motor activity. Here, we combined diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) with a behavioral measure of visually induced gain in pitch discrimination, and we used measures of cortical thickness (CT) correlations to assess how auditory specialization and musical expertise are reflected in the structural architecture of white and grey matter relevant to audiovisual processing. Across all participants (n = 45), we found a correlation (p < 0.001) between reliance on visual cues in pitch discrimination and the fractional anisotropy (FA) in the left inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF), a structure connecting visual and auditory brain areas. Group analyses also revealed greater cortical thickness correlation between visual and auditory areas in non-musicians (n = 28) compared to musicians (n = 17), possibly reflecting musicians’ auditory specialization (FDR < 10%). Our results corroborate and expand current knowledge of functional specialization with a specific focus on audition, and highlight the fact that perception is essentially multimodal while uni-sensory processing is a specialized task.
Highlights
Our sensory systems provide complementary information about the multimodal objects and events that are the target of perception in everyday life
The purpose of the present study was to assess how auditory specialization and musical expertise are reflected in the structural architecture of white and grey matter involved in audiovisual processing
bimodal compatibility gain (BCG) was quantified by subtracting the mean d’ across the two pitch levels in the “no visual cue” condition from that of the “crossmodally matching” condition of the behavioral experiment, separately for each participant
Summary
Our sensory systems provide complementary information about the multimodal objects and events that are the target of perception in everyday life. The purpose of the present study was to assess how auditory specialization and musical expertise are reflected in the structural architecture of white and grey matter involved in audiovisual processing To this aim, we used DTI in combination with a behavioral measure of auditory specialization, operationalized as visually induced gain in pitch d iscrimination[25]. Responses in the crossmodally matching condition were compared to the condition in which the visual information did not provide information about the pitch change (see “Materials and methods” and Supplementary Information, Fig. S1) This difference measure, termed bimodal compatibility gain (BCG), was used in the analysis of the DTI data across all participants (n = 45) to assess how relative reliance on visual information in an auditory task is reflected in white matter connections between auditory and visual brain areas
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