title: Cortical plasticity induced by short-term unimodal and multimodal musical training.
abstract: Learning to play a musical instrument requires complex multimodal skills involving simultaneous perception of several sensory modalities: auditory, visual, somatosensory, as well as the motor system. Therefore, musical training provides a good and adequate neuroscientific model to study multimodal brain plasticity effects in humans. Here, we investigated the impact of short-term unimodal and multimodal musical training on brain plasticity. Two groups of nonmusicians were musically trained over the course of 2 weeks. One group [sensorimotor-auditory (SA)] learned to play a musical sequence on the piano, whereas the other group [auditory (A)] listened to and made judgments about the music that had been played by participants of the sensorimotor-auditory group. Training-induced cortical plasticity was assessed by recording the musically elicited mismatch negativity (MMNm) from magnetoencephalographic measurements before and after training. SA and A groups showed significantly different cortical responses after training. Specifically, the SA group showed significant enlargement of MMNm after training compared with the A group, reflecting greater enhancement of musical representations in auditory cortex after sensorimotor-auditory training compared with after mere auditory training. Thus, we have experimentally demonstrated that not only are sensorimotor and auditory systems connected, but also that sensorimotor-auditory training causes plastic reorganizational changes in the auditory cortex over and above changes introduced by auditory training alone.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis, University of Münster, 48149 Münster, Germany.
authors.forename: Claudia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Lappe
authors.forename: Sibylle C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Herholz
authors.forename: Laurel J
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Trainor
authors.forename: Christo
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Pantev
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000166:cytology* / Q000502:physiology*; D003265:Contingent Negative Variation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D015225:Magnetoencephalography / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D009048:Motor Skills / Q000502:physiology*; D009146:Music; D009473:Neuronal Plasticity / Q000502:physiology*; D010897:Pitch Discrimination / Q000502:physiology; D013997:Time Factors