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Musical ability is associated with enhanced auditory and visual cognitive processing

BACKGROUND: Musical ability has always been linked to enhanced cognitive and intellectual skills. We were interested in the relation between musical ability and short-time cognitive processing as measured by event-related potentials, in particular in visual processing, since previous studies have al...

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Autores principales: Faßhauer, Caroline, Frese, Achim, Evers, Stefan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4574220/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26377548
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12868-015-0200-4
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author Faßhauer, Caroline
Frese, Achim
Evers, Stefan
author_facet Faßhauer, Caroline
Frese, Achim
Evers, Stefan
author_sort Faßhauer, Caroline
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Musical ability has always been linked to enhanced cognitive and intellectual skills. We were interested in the relation between musical ability and short-time cognitive processing as measured by event-related potentials, in particular in visual processing, since previous studies have already suggested such a link for acoustic cognitive processing. We measured auditory and visual event-related potentials as elicited by an oddball paradigm in 20 healthy subjects (10 musicians and 10 non-musicians; 10 female; mean age 24 ± 2 years). In addition, the Seashore test and a test developed by the authors to detect relevant amusia, the latter one with a high ceiling effect, were also applied. RESULTS: The most important finding was that there is a significant linear correlation between musical ability as measured by these tests and the P3 latencies of both the auditory and visual event-related potentials. Furthermore, musicians showed shorter latencies of the event-related potentials than non-musicians. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that musical ability as measured by neuropsychological tests is associated with improved short-time cognitive processing both in the auditory and, surprisingly, also in the visual domain.
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spelling pubmed-45742202015-09-19 Musical ability is associated with enhanced auditory and visual cognitive processing Faßhauer, Caroline Frese, Achim Evers, Stefan BMC Neurosci Research Article BACKGROUND: Musical ability has always been linked to enhanced cognitive and intellectual skills. We were interested in the relation between musical ability and short-time cognitive processing as measured by event-related potentials, in particular in visual processing, since previous studies have already suggested such a link for acoustic cognitive processing. We measured auditory and visual event-related potentials as elicited by an oddball paradigm in 20 healthy subjects (10 musicians and 10 non-musicians; 10 female; mean age 24 ± 2 years). In addition, the Seashore test and a test developed by the authors to detect relevant amusia, the latter one with a high ceiling effect, were also applied. RESULTS: The most important finding was that there is a significant linear correlation between musical ability as measured by these tests and the P3 latencies of both the auditory and visual event-related potentials. Furthermore, musicians showed shorter latencies of the event-related potentials than non-musicians. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that musical ability as measured by neuropsychological tests is associated with improved short-time cognitive processing both in the auditory and, surprisingly, also in the visual domain. BioMed Central 2015-09-16 /pmc/articles/PMC4574220/ /pubmed/26377548 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12868-015-0200-4 Text en © Faßhauer et al. 2015 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Faßhauer, Caroline
Frese, Achim
Evers, Stefan
Musical ability is associated with enhanced auditory and visual cognitive processing
title Musical ability is associated with enhanced auditory and visual cognitive processing
title_full Musical ability is associated with enhanced auditory and visual cognitive processing
title_fullStr Musical ability is associated with enhanced auditory and visual cognitive processing
title_full_unstemmed Musical ability is associated with enhanced auditory and visual cognitive processing
title_short Musical ability is associated with enhanced auditory and visual cognitive processing
title_sort musical ability is associated with enhanced auditory and visual cognitive processing
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4574220/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26377548
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12868-015-0200-4
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