Abstract
Musical training can induce the functional and structural changes of the hippocampus. The hippocampus is not a homogeneous structure which can be divided into anterior and posterior parts along its longitudinal axis, and the whole-brain structural covariances of anterior (aHC) and posterior hippocampus (pHC) show distinct patterns in young adults. However, little is known about whether the anterior and posterior hippocampal structural covariances change after long-term musical training. Here, we investigated the musical training-induced changes of the whole-brain structural covariances of bilateral aHC and pHC in a longitudinal designed experiment with two groups (training group and control group) across three time points [the beginning (TP1) and the end (TP2) of 24 weeks of training, and 12 weeks after training (TP3)]. Using seed partial least square, we identified two significant patterns of structural covariance of the aHC and pHC. The first showed common structural covariance of the aHC and pHC. The second pattern revealed distinct structural covariance of the two regions and reflected the changes of structural covariance of the left pHC in the training group across three time points: the left pHC showed significant structural covariance with bilateral hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus, left calcarine sulcus only at TP1 and TP3. Furthermore, the integrity of distinct structural networks of aHC and pHC in the second pattern significantly increased in the training group. Our findings suggest that musical training could change the organization of structural whole-brain covariance for left pHC and enhance the degree of the structural covariance network differentiation of the aHC and pHC in young adults.
Highlights
Brain plasticity refers to the ability of our brain to modify its organization to learn new skills and adapt to new environments (Draganski et al, 2004; Kehayas and Holtmaat, 2017)
Because no significant time effect, as well as the time over group effect were found for all volumetric measures (i.e. total intracranial volume (TIV), gray matter volume (GMV), average voxel values of four hippocampal subregions) and cognitive scores, we did not involve them in correlation analysis with the practice time
The anterior hippocampus (aHC) and posterior hippocampus (pHC) of both groups were significantly related to this pattern and show similar seed-correlations across three time points
Summary
Brain plasticity refers to the ability of our brain to modify its organization to learn new skills and adapt to new environments (Draganski et al, 2004; Kehayas and Holtmaat, 2017). It comes with structural changes in GMV (Koch et al, 2016) and cortical thickness (Hervais-Adelman et al, 2017), and functional changes in the intensity of neural responses (Sonntag and Arendt, 2019) and the number of activated voxels in specific tasks (Thompson et al, 2016). What’s more, increased functional connectivity between the cerebellum and hippocampus is observed in musicians compared to nonmusicians (Burunat et al, 2018)
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