Temporal Processing of Audiovisual Stimuli Is Enhanced in Musicians: Evidence from Magnetoencephalography (MEG)

Abstract

Numerous studies have demonstrated that the structural and functional differences between professional musicians and non-musicians are not only found within a single modality, but also with regard to multisensory integration. In this study we have combined psychophysical with neurophysiological measurements investigating the processing of non-musical, synchronous or various levels of asynchronous audiovisual events. We hypothesize that long-term multisensory experience alters temporal audiovisual processing already at a non-musical stage. Behaviorally, musicians scored significantly better than non-musicians in judging whether the auditory and visual stimuli were synchronous or asynchronous. At the neural level, the statistical analysis for the audiovisual asynchronous response revealed three clusters of activations including the ACC and the SFG and two bilaterally located activations in IFG and STG in both groups. Musicians, in comparison to the non-musicians, responded to synchronous audiovisual events with enhanced neuronal activity in a broad left posterior temporal region that covers the STG, the insula and the Postcentral Gyrus. Musicians also showed significantly greater activation in the left Cerebellum, when confronted with an audiovisual asynchrony. Taken together, our MEG results form a strong indication that long-term musical training alters the basic audiovisual temporal processing already in an early stage (direct after the auditory N1 wave), while the psychophysical results indicate that musical training may also provide behavioral benefits in the accuracy of the estimates regarding the timing of audiovisual events.

Shared Neural Mechanisms for the Prediction of Own and Partner Musical Sequences after Short-term Piano Duet Training

“…The cerebellum is considered difficult to detect with MEG, since it is positioned rather distant from the sensors. Several recent MEG studies, however, have shown activation in cerebellar networks (Krause et al, 2010; Wibral et al, 2010; Fujioka et al, 2014; Lu et al, 2014). In the present study, cerebellar activation is consistently observed in almost all conditions and is clearly contralateral to the cortical activity, which is consistent with the opposing organization between cerebellar cortex and neocortex.…”

Musicians have enhanced audiovisual multisensory binding: experience-dependent effects in the double-flash illusion

“…These data suggest that musical training sharpens the overall tracking and binding of perceptually relevant information from multiple sensory systems, and does so for speech and nonspeech stimuli alike (cf. Lu et al 2014). This notion is supported by other recent studies which have similarly shown that intensive musical training improves aspects of working memory ) and general temporal acuity (Rammsayer et al 2012) irrespective of sensory modality (i.e., both auditory and visual enhancements).…”

“…For example, using stimuli in which auditory (speech utterances) and visual (speaker's lips) cues are delivered in a temporally asynchronous manner, several studies have reported higher sensitivity for detecting audiovisual coherence and hence more restricted integration windows in trained musicians (Lee and Noppeney 2011;Paraskevopoulos et al 2012;Lee and Noppeney 2014). Yet, with few exceptions (Lu et al 2014), these studies have employed speech and musical stimuli. Consequently, it remains unclear if musicians' alleged improvements in multisensory integration result from domain-general benefits in audiovisual processing, per se, or instead from musicians' well-known superiority in processing linguistically and musically relevant stimuli (Kraus and Chandrasekaran 2010;Bidelman 2013;Moreno and Bidelman 2014).…”

Musical expertise is related to neuroplastic changes of multisensory nature within the auditory cortex

“…We hypothesised that music training induces neuroplastic changes of multisensory nature within the auditory cortex. In order to investigate this, we reanalysed the results of four previous MEG studies on multisensory processing, with a new focus exclusively on activity within the auditory cortex (Brodmann areas 41 and 42) (Paraskevopoulos et al ., , ; Kuchenbuch et al ., ; Lu et al ., ). This allowed us to detect subtle effects that might not have passed the significance threshold in previous whole‐brain analyses.…”