A Multimodal Neural Network Recruited by Expertise with Musical Notation

Abstract

Prior neuroimaging work on visual perceptual expertise has focused on changes in the visual system, ignoring possible effects of acquiring expert visual skills in nonvisual areas. We investigated expertise for reading musical notation, a skill likely to be associated with multimodal abilities. We compared brain activity in music-reading experts and novices during perception of musical notation, Roman letters, and mathematical symbols and found selectivity for musical notation for experts in a widespread multimodal network of areas. The activity in several of these areas was correlated with a behavioral measure of perceptual fluency with musical notation, suggesting that activity in nonvisual areas can predict individual differences in visual expertise. The visual selectivity for musical notation is distinct from that for faces, single Roman letters, and letter strings. Implications of the current findings to the study of visual perceptual expertise, music reading, and musical expertise are discussed.

Music and words in the visual cortex: The impact of musical expertise

“…In music reading, Wong & Gauthier (2010a) found stronger activation in musicians than in controls in the fusiform gyrus, slightly more mesial but only 2 mm off along the anteroposterior axis , as compared to the present results. These activations contrasting single notes versus letters and other symbols are described as posterior to letter-selective areas, but no coordinates are reported for the latter.…”

“…This overall result is congruent with Muaykil et al (2015), who recently found left frontal and parietal activations in subjects with elementary musical competence, and with Stewart et al (2003), who found training effects of music reading in the left inferior parietal lobule. Wong & Gauthier (2010a), report bilateral activations in musical experts, and also mention left inferior parietal activations. The present study focusses on occipitotemporal processing, and it is out of our scope to speculate on the interpretation of whole-brain activations, beyond checking that our results fit with the literature.…”

“…These activations contrasting single notes versus letters and other symbols are described as posterior to letter-selective areas, but no coordinates are reported for the latter. Curiously, Wong & Gauthier (2010a) found no significant effect of expertise when using strings of notes, letters and symbols. In an EEG study, Proverbio et al (2013) found an increase in the amplitude of the occipitotemporal N170 wave in response to music notation, with left-hemispheric predominance, in musicians relative to controls.…”

“…In humans, there is also evidence for segregated activations for letters and numerals in the fusiform gyrus (Polk et al, 2002;Shum et al, 2013;Abboud et al, 2015), and for Chinese vs alphabetic stimuli in the early visual cortex (Szwed et al, 2014). There are also some indications of segregated activations for printed words and musical notation in the occipitotemporal cortex (Wong and Gauthier, 2010a), but this evidence is controversial (Muayqil et al, 2015) and is not supported by statistical comparisons of activation topography between words and music.…”

High-resolution imaging of expertise reveals reliable object selectivity in the fusiform face area related to perceptual performance

“…neural selectivity | object recognition | individual differences | response reliability | ventral temporal cortex C ategory-selective responses in the visual system are found for several categories, including faces, limbs, scenes, words, letters, and even musical notation (1)(2)(3)(4)(5). However, a plausible argument can be made for a genetically determined brain system specialized for the representation of faces (6), which includes the fusiform face area (FFA).…”