Sound processing in amateur musicians and nonmusicians: event-related potential and behavioral indices.

Full Abstract

To increase our understanding of auditory neurocognition in musicians, we compared nonmusicians with amateur band musicians in their neural and behavioral sound encoding accuracy. Mismatch negativity and P3a components of the auditory event-related potentials were recorded to changes in basic acoustic features (frequency, duration, location, intensity, gap) and abstract features (melodic contour and interval size). Mismatch negativity was larger in musicians than in nonmusicians for location changes whereas no statistically significant group difference was observed in response to other feature changes or in abstract-feature mismatch negativity. P3a was observed only in musicians in response to location changes. This suggests that when compared with nonmusicians, even amateur musicians have neural sound processing advantages with acoustic information most essential to their musical genre.

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Author information

Author/s: Tervaniemi, Mari (M); Castaneda, Anu (A); Knoll, Monja (M); Uther, Maria (M);

Affiliation: Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. mari.tervaniemi(-atsign-)helsinki.fi

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Neuroreport (Neuroreport), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2006-Jul; vol 17 (issue 11) : pp 1225-8

Dates: Created 2006/07/13; Completed 2006/09/15; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 16837859, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Behavior - physiology
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Hearing - physiology
Hobbies
Humans

Humans
Male
Music
Occupations
Reference Values

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