The effect of musical training on perception and processing in the auditory cortex

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

During the last years music has increasingly been used as a tool for the investigation of human cognition and its underlying brain mechanisms. Music relates to many brain functions like perception, action, cognition, emotion, learning and memory and therefore music is an ideal tool to investigate how the human brain is working and how different brain functions interact. Using human brain imaging techniques we have reported that musical skill in string players is associated with enhanced sensory-motor cortical representation of the fingering digits. The musical skill in trained musicians leads to enhanced auditory cortical representation for musical notes and even to an enhanced cortical representations specifically for the musical tones of the instrument of practice. In principle, brain attributes found in musicians may be influenced by a genetic code or they may be induced by neuroplastic mechanisms such as those identified in animal research that modify synaptic connections and neural growth processes during training. In previous studies we were able to show the short- and long-term plasticity of the auditory and somatosensory cortex in musician and to demonstrate quantitatively their temporal dynamics and even their multimodal interaction. In this project we propose a series of new experiments, partly of cross sectional designs, comparing adult musician and nonmusician samples with the goal to increase our knowledge about the training induced uni- and multimodal plasticity of the human brain. The connecting elements between the different studies as proposed in this project are the auditory processing and the musical expertise. More specifically we do like by means of ¿state of the art¿ MEG technology and ¿beam former¿ signal processing technique to understand the interaction between performance training and auditory processing, to investigate the importance of pitch perception in general as fundamental for auditory processing, to evaluate the role of training-induced attention in music, to explore in details the neuronal networks involved during musical performance and to show the cross-modal reorganization of cortical functions in professional piano players and to find out if there is a correlation between the temporal integration and resolution in the auditory system and the rhythmic perception in music.