The effect of musical expertise on the representation of space.

Silvia Cucchi,Lotfi B Merabet,Carlotta Lega,Zaira Cattaneo,Tomaso Vecchi

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00250

Abstract

Consistent evidence suggests that pitch height may be represented in a spatial format, having both a vertical and a horizontal representation. The spatial representation of pitch height results into response compatibility effects for which high pitch tones are preferentially associated to up-right responses, and low pitch tones are preferentially associated to down-left responses (i.e., the Spatial-Musical Association of Response Codes (SMARC) effect), with the strength of these associations depending on individuals’ musical skills. In this study we investigated whether listening to tones of different pitch affects the representation of external space, as assessed in a visual and haptic line bisection paradigm, in musicians and non musicians. Low and high pitch tones affected the bisection performance in musicians differently, both when pitch was relevant and irrelevant for the task, and in both the visual and the haptic modality. No effect of pitch height was observed on the bisection performance of non musicians. Moreover, our data also show that musicians present a (supramodal) rightward bisection bias in both the visual and the haptic modality, extending previous findings limited to the visual modality, and consistent with the idea that intense practice with musical notation and bimanual instrument training affects hemispheric lateralization.

Highlights

There is evidence that the pitch of a sound may be represented in a spatial format referred to as the “mental pitch line”
The spatial representation of pitch height results into response compatibility effects for which high pitch tones are preferentially associated to up-right responses, and low pitch tones are preferentially associated to down-left responses (i.e., the Spatial-Musical Association of Response Codes (SMARC) effect), with the strength of these associations depending on individuals’ musical skills
The results of Experiment 2 demonstrate that pitch height influences the representation of visual and haptic horizontal space in musicians, but not in non musicians. This was the case both when pitch height was relevant for the task, and when it was irrelevant

Summary

Introduction

There is evidence that the pitch of a sound (i.e., the tone characteristic of being high or low and corresponding to its position in the musical scale, see Miller, 1916) may be represented in a spatial format referred to as the “mental pitch line” (see Rusconi et al, 2006). Converging findings (e.g., Rusconi et al, 2006; Lidji et al, 2007; Nishimura and Yokosawa, 2009; Cho et al, 2012) revealed that the mental pitch line affects manual motor responses: when an up or down response to a high or low pitched tone is required, individuals typically perform better for the mapping of the high tone to the up response (i.e., a key positioned in the upper part of the keyboard or response box) and the low tone to the down response (correspondingly, a key positioned in the lower part of the keyboard or response box) than for the opposite mapping. The SMARC effect in the horizontal plane may reflect spatial orthogonal stimulus-response compatibility mechanisms (see Rusconi et al, 2006; Nishimura and Yokosawa, 2009; see Cho et al, 2012): a preferential up-right/down-left mapping has been consistently reported (e.g., Cho and Proctor, 2003), because a high pitch is spatially coded as “up” it would be preferentially associated to the “right”

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