Abstract
Musicians’ brains are considered to be a functional model of neuroplasticity due to the structural and functional changes associated with long-term musical training. In this study, we examined implicit extraction of statistical regularities from a continuous stream of stimuli—statistical learning (SL). We investigated whether long-term musical training is associated with better extraction of statistical cues in an auditory SL (aSL) task and a visual SL (vSL) task—both using the embedded triplet paradigm. Online measures, characterized by event related potentials (ERPs), were recorded during a familiarization phase while participants were exposed to a continuous stream of individually presented pure tones in the aSL task or individually presented cartoon figures in the vSL task. Unbeknown to participants, the stream was composed of triplets. Musicians showed advantages when compared to non-musicians in the online measure (early N1 and N400 triplet onset effects) during the aSL task. However, there were no differences between musicians and non-musicians for the vSL task. Results from the current study show that musical training is associated with enhancements in extraction of statistical cues only in the auditory domain.
Highlights
Long-term musical training has been associated with positive effects on the encoding of auditory information
We hypothesized that musicians would show a larger triplet onset effect in the online measure of auditory SL (aSL) compared to nonmusicians
Better performance on the event related potentials (ERPs) task was characterized in musicians by presence of both N1 and N400 triplet onset effects during the initial part of familiarization
Summary
Long-term musical training has been associated with positive effects on the encoding of auditory information. It has been reported that musicians have larger brain responses to speech (Musacchia et al, 2007), better pre-attentive discrimination of small changes in auditory stimuli (Koelsch et al, 1999) and better skills at organizing tones according to changing pitch relations (van Zuijen et al, 2004). Musicians have predictive error detection, that is to say changes in their brain responses can be observed even before they have played incorrect keystrokes (Maidhof et al, 2009; Ruiz et al, 2009). Studying the differences in brain responses of musicians and non-musicians could assist in understanding the long-term consequences of musical training. We investigated whether long-term musical training is associated with enhanced SL by comparing musicians and non-musicians
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