Music training relates to the development of neural mechanisms of selective auditory attention

Abstract

Selective attention decreases trial-to-trial variability in cortical auditory-evoked activity. This effect increases over the course of maturation, potentially reflecting the gradual development of selective attention and inhibitory control. Work in adults indicates that music training may alter the development of this neural response characteristic, especially over brain regions associated with executive control: in adult musicians, attention decreases variability in auditory-evoked responses recorded over prefrontal cortex to a greater extent than in nonmusicians. We aimed to determine whether this musician-associated effect emerges during childhood, when selective attention and inhibitory control are under development. We compared cortical auditory-evoked variability to attended and ignored speech streams in musicians and nonmusicians across three age groups: preschoolers, school-aged children and young adults. Results reveal that childhood music training is associated with reduced auditory-evoked response variability recorded over prefrontal cortex during selective auditory attention in school-aged child and adult musicians. Preschoolers, on the other hand, demonstrate no impact of selective attention on cortical response variability and no musician distinctions. This finding is consistent with the gradual emergence of attention during this period and may suggest no pre-existing differences in this attention-related cortical metric between children who undergo music training and those who do not.

Professional Music Training and Novel Word Learning: From Faster Semantic Encoding to Longer-lasting Word Representations

“…Moreover, both musically trained children (Jentschke & Koelsch, 2009) and adults (Fitzroy & Sanders, 2013) are more sensitive to violations of linguistic and music syntax than participants without music training. Perhaps most importantly, recent results also showed that long-term music training positively improves cognitive functions such as auditory attention (Strait, Slater, O'Connell, & Kraus, 2015), visual attention ( Wang, Ossher, & ReuterLorenz, 2015), working and verbal memory (George & Coch, 2011;Ho, Cheung, & Chan, 2003), executive functions (Zuk, Benjamin, Kenyon, & Gaab, 2014;Moreno et al, 2011;Pallesen et al, 2010), and general intelligence (Schellenberg, 2004). These findings are not surprising insofar as playing an instrument at a professional level is a multidimensional task that, together with specific motor abilities, requires acute auditory perception and focused attention, code switching between the visual information on the score and the corresponding sounds, as well as the ability to maintain auditory information in short-and long-term memory.…”

“…The first interpretation, in terms of cascading effects, is that enhanced auditory perception and auditory attention (Strait et al, 2015) in musicians drive the facilitation observed in word learning through different subsequent steps (i.e., building up new phonological representations and attaching meaning to them, storing this new information in short-and long-term memory). In support of this interpretation, the error rate in the musicality test was correlated with the size of the N400 effect in the semantic task in musicians but not in controls (Figure 7), thereby clearly pointing to a relationship between auditory perception/ attention and word learning.…”

“…Because this task was more difficult for French native speakers than the other tasks, as revealed by behavioral data, the increased N100 may reflect increased focused attention (Strait et al, 2015) and mobilization of neuronal resources in musicians. An alternative but complementary interpretation is that this increase in N100 amplitude reflected increased neural synchronicity and structural connectivity in musicians, who are typically more sensitive to the acoustic-phonetic properties of speech sounds than nonmusicians who showed similar N100 components in all tasks (Bidelman et al, 2014;Elmer et al, 2013;Chobert et al, 2012;Musacchia et al, 2007;Wong & Perrachione, 2007).…”

Quantifying the effects of external factors on individual performance

“…Liking the music is, therefore, one major aspect when seeking positive effects from its listening. Among many other effects, major higher cognitive functions positively affected by music include reading and literacy skills [33], working memory and mathematical abilities [34], memory [35] or concentration and attention [36].…”

Speech-Evoked Brainstem Response

“…A long-term of auditory experience can improve the performance of the whole auditory system. Therefore, a subject who has a good processing of speech sounds has better electrophysiological responses for this type of stimulus, showing that auditory experience might modify the basic sensorial coding of the whole auditory pathway [18][19][20][21]. On the other hand, a subject who has auditory deprivation may have significant electrophysiological changes in the auditory system, as can be seen in children with history of otitis media.…”