Gesture imitation in musicians and non-musicians

Abstract

Imitation plays a crucial role in the learning of many complex motor skills. Recent behavioral and neuroimaging evidence suggests that the ability to imitate is influenced by past experience, such as musical training. To investigate the impact of musical training on motor imitation, musicians and non-musicians were tested on their ability to imitate videoclips of simple and complex two-handed gestures taken from American Sign Language. Participants viewed a set of 30 gestures, one at a time, and imitated them immediately after presentation. Participants' imitations were videotaped and scored off-line by raters blind to participant group. Imitation performance was assessed by a rating of performance accuracy, where the arm, hand, and finger components of the gestures were rated separately on a 5-point scale (1 = unrecognizable; 5 = exact imitation). A global accuracy score (PAglobal) was calculated by summing the three components. Response duration compared to the model (%MTdiff), and reaction time (RT) were also assessed. Results indicated that musicians were able to imitate more accurately than non-musicians, reflected by significantly higher PAglobal and lower %MTdiff scores. Furthermore, the greatest difference in performance was for the fine-motor (finger) gesture component. These findings support the view that the ability to imitate is influenced by experience. This is consistent with generalist theories of motor imitation, which explain imitation in terms of links between perceptual and motor action representations that become strengthened through experience. It is also likely that musical training contributed to the ability to imitate manual gestures by influencing the personal action repertoire of musicians.

Investigating the influence of musical training on cross-modal correspondences and sensorimotor skills in a real-time drawing paradigm

“…Taken together, musically trained participants outperform musically untrained participants in terms of accuracy in a real-time drawing task of pitch and loudness, which adds to the increasing literature of findings suggesting that musically trained participants' (sensori-)motor skills are transferable to other, non-specific domains (Spilka, et al, 2010). However, our results are limited insofar as they cannot disentangle musically trained participants' motoric skills from training effects of audio-visual mappings or basic auditory discrimination skills (but note that we attempted to minimize potential differences in the latter by choosing very simple sound stimuli and presenting them twice).…”

The Sign Language of Music: Musical Shaping Gestures (MSGs) in Rehearsal Talk by Performers with Hearing Impairments

“…The parsing of streams of information, whether visual, as in sign language, or aural as in music or speech, involves the Brodmann 47 region of the brain (Levitin & Menon, 2003) and a recent study with deaf signers, deaf non-signers and hearing non-signers has shown that regions of the superior temporal cortex that normally respond to auditory linguistic stimuli not only adapt to perceive visual input (sign language) but also retain their original cognitive functionality (Cardin, Orfanidou, Ronnberg, Capek, Rudner, & Woll, 2013). People with musical training are better at copying gestures (Spilka, Steele, & Penhune, 2010) and autistic children's memory for hand signs accompanied by music is better than those accompanied by rhythms or speech (Buday, 1995). Conductors can also accurately recognise the emotional content of other conductors' gestures (Wöllner, 2012).…”

Effect of mindfulness meditation on brain–computer interface performance

“…Studies also found that musicians have performed better than non-musicians on auditory processing (Chartrand & Belin, 2006;Špajdel, Jariabková, & Riečanský, 2007;Strait, Kraus, Parbery-Clark, & Ashley, 2010) and fine motor abilities (Amunts et al, 1997;Hughes & Franz, 2007;Spilka, Steele, & Penhune, 2010).…”