Cortical Plasticity in 4-Month-Old Infants: Specific Effects of Experience with Musical Timbres

Abstract

Animal models suggest that the brain is particularly neuroplastic early in development, but previous studies have not systematically controlled the auditory environment in human infants and observed the effects on auditory cortical representations. We exposed 4-month-old infants to melodies in either guitar or marimba timbre (infants were randomly assigned to exposure group) for a total of ~160 min over the course of a week, after which we measured electroencephalogram (EEG) responses to guitar and marimba tones at pitches not previously heard during the exposure phase. A frontally negative response with a topography consistent with generation in auditory areas, peaking around 450 ms, was significantly larger for guitar than marimba tones in the guitar-exposed group but significantly larger for marimba than guitar tones in the marimba-exposed group. This indicates that experience with tones in a particular timbre affects representations for that timbre, and that this effect generalizes to tones not previously experienced during exposure. Furthermore, mismatch responses to occasional small 3% changes in pitch were larger for tones in guitar than marimba timbre only for infants exposed to guitar tones. Together these results indicate that a relatively small amount of passive exposure to a particular timbre in infancy enhances representations of that timbre and leads to more precise pitch processing for that timbre.

Short-term Music Training Enhances Complex, Distributed Neural Communication during Music and Linguistic Tasks

“…Recent longitudinal studies have observed structural (Hyde et al, 2009) and functional (Seither-Preisler, Parncutt, & Schneider, 2014; Trainor, Lee, & Bosnyak, 2011) music-induced neuroplasticity that corroborates correlational differences between adult musicians and nonmusicians (for reviews, see Herholz & Zatorre, 2012; Münte, Altenmüller, & Jäncke, 2002). Multiple studies have suggested that the neural basis of the reported music-to-other-cognition transfer effects involves enhancement of neural resources shared with general executive cognition; however, they acknowledge that the methods failed to capture sufficient cortical dynamics to describe a more specific mechanism (Moreno et al, 2011; Jentschke & Koelsch, 2009; Patel, 2003).…”

Art and science: how musical training shapes the brain

“…After half of these children underwent one year of piano training, however, these same children showed strengthened induced gamma-band activity in response to piano tones (Trainor et al, 2009). In fact, it was subsequently observed that infants simply exposed to music for ~160 min over the course of a week to a particular musical timbre demonstrate enhanced timbre-specific cortical responses (Trainor et al, 2011), supporting the interpretation that little instrumental exposure is necessary to induce cortical timbre specializations. To determine whether the expression of timbre-specific encoding within the auditory brainstem unfolds with similar rapidity, we collected cABRs to piano, bassoon and tuba tones in children who had undergone instrumental training for anywhere from 3 to 10 years, predicting that children would demonstrate preferential cABRs to their own instrument.…”

Learning-induced neural plasticity of speech processing before birth

“…The mother could choose between a classical piece, a short Latin American melody, or a children's melody. Although some musical genres may be more facilitative than others (46), unfortunately, the music choices were not recorded.…”