Selective neurophysiologic responses to music in instrumentalists with different listening biographies - PubMed (original) (raw)

Selective neurophysiologic responses to music in instrumentalists with different listening biographies

Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis et al. Hum Brain Mapp. 2009 Jan.

Abstract

To appropriately adapt to constant sensory stimulation, neurons in the auditory system are tuned to various acoustic characteristics, such as center frequencies, frequency modulations, and their combinations, particularly those combinations that carry species-specific communicative functions. The present study asks whether such tunings extend beyond acoustic and communicative functions to auditory self-relevance and expertise. More specifically, we examined the role of the listening biography--an individual's long term experience with a particular type of auditory input--on perceptual-neural plasticity. Two groups of expert instrumentalists (violinists and flutists) listened to matched musical excerpts played on the two instruments (J.S. Bach Partitas for solo violin and flute) while their cerebral hemodynamic responses were measured using fMRI. Our experimental design allowed for a comprehensive investigation of the neurophysiology (cerebral hemodynamic responses as measured by fMRI) of auditory expertise (i.e., when violinists listened to violin music and when flutists listened to flute music) and nonexpertise (i.e., when subjects listened to music played on the other instrument). We found an extensive cerebral network of expertise, which implicates increased sensitivity to musical syntax (BA 44), timbre (auditory association cortex), and sound-motor interactions (precentral gyrus) when listening to music played on the instrument of expertise (the instrument for which subjects had a unique listening biography). These findings highlight auditory self-relevance and expertise as a mechanism of perceptual-neural plasticity, and implicate neural tuning that includes and extends beyond acoustic and communication-relevant structures.

(c) 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

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Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1

Stimulus presentation and image acquisition. Scanning occurred during the first 2 s and violin or flute excerpts were presented during the remaining 12 s. Note scanner induced activations will not be present during subsequent image acquisition because of the 12 s delay.

Figure 2

Figure 2

Brain activation revealed by the Instrument of Expertise vs. Nonexpertise Instrument contrast (based on a random effect analysis) showing activation in left BA 44/6, Precentral Gyrus, and STG. Bar graphs show activation for each instrument for each subject group. Error bars indicate standard error of the mean. Activation is projected onto a T1‐weighted volume averaged across all subjects; color bar indicates strength of activation in t value (also applied to Fig. 3). [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at www.interscience.wiley.com.\]

Figure 3

Figure 3

Brain activation revealed by the Instrument of Expertise vs. Nonexpertise Instrument contrast (based on a random effect analysis) showing activation in IPL (left panel) and MeFG (right panel). Bar graphs show activation for each instrument for each subject group. Error bars indicate standard error of the mean. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at www.interscience.wiley.com.\]

Figure 4

Figure 4

Left STG activation demonstrating a listening biography effect. Top panel: Percent signal change in the left STG cluster (cluster defined by activation in group map) shown on Figure 2, which revealed a significant instrument × group interaction (see text for statistics). Bottom panel: Percent signal change in a 5 × 5 × 5‐mm3 kernel surrounding [−57, −36, 10] in left STG defined by Ohnishi et al. [2001]; a significant instrument × group interaction was also found. Error bars indicate standard error of the mean.

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