Musical Expertise Induces Audiovisual Integration of Abstract Congruency Rules

Abstract

Perception of everyday life events relies mostly on multisensory integration. Hence, studying the neural correlates of the integration of multiple senses constitutes an important tool in understanding perception within an ecologically valid framework. The present study used magnetoencephalography in human subjects to identify the neural correlates of an audiovisual incongruency response, which is not generated due to incongruency of the unisensory physical characteristics of the stimulation but from the violation of an abstract congruency rule. The chosen rule-"the higher the pitch of the tone, the higher the position of the circle"-was comparable to musical reading. In parallel, plasticity effects due to long-term musical training on this response were investigated by comparing musicians to nonmusicians. The applied paradigm was based on an appropriate modification of the multifeatured oddball paradigm incorporating, within one run, deviants based on a multisensory audiovisual incongruent condition and two unisensory mismatch conditions: an auditory and a visual one. Results indicated the presence of an audiovisual incongruency response, generated mainly in frontal regions, an auditory mismatch negativity, and a visual mismatch response. Moreover, results revealed that long-term musical training generates plastic changes in frontal, temporal, and occipital areas that affect this multisensory incongruency response as well as the unisensory auditory and visual mismatch responses.

Musical expertise is related to altered functional connectivity during audiovisual integration

“…The organization of this network indicates that musicians make greater use of the temporal sources (and auditory information accordingly). The present results closely relate to previous results reported by our group (9,10). This analysis further revealed that musicians showed significantly greater activity than nonmusicians in superior frontal, superior temporal, and lingual gyrus when confronted with incongruences.…”

“…The behavioral results are in line with previously reported ones (9), indicating that musicians' prior experience in musical reading is associated with a behavioral benefit. Previous psychophysical studies have reported similar results among nonmusicians, indicating that the identification of cross-modal correspondences between pitch height and the height of a visual stimulus may be innate (13).…”

“…A new dataset was created for the present study from MEG measurements that have been presented in two previous publications (9,10). In the new dataset, we included the same number of musicians and nonmusicians for whom MRI data were available.…”

“…A recent study by Paraskevopoulos et al (9) used MEG to reveal the cortical response related to identification of audiovisual incongruences. These incongruences occurred on the basis of an explicitly learned rule, binding otherwise unrelated unisensory stimuli.…”

Brain nutrition-orthomolecular aspects

“…Music is capable of activate at the same time millions of neural networks and stimulate the most diverse brain areas. It's clear that this audio-visual and abstract integration will develop neurogenesis [69,70]. In 2013, people between 60 to 84 years old have been studied during 4 months of piano lessons and the results showed an improvement of attention, mood, cognitive skills, motor function, visual memory and executive functioning [71][72][73] suggested that 60-75 minutes of music training for a period of 5 to 6 weeks is good enough to help elderly to reverse age-related decline.…”