A multimodal comparison of temporal order judgments in musicians and non-musicians

Abstract

Considerable evidence converges on the plasticity of attention and the possibility that it can be modulated through regular training. Musical training, for instance, has been correlated with modulations of early perceptual and attentional processes. However, the extent to which musical training can modulate mechanisms involved in processing information (i.e., perception and attention) is still widely unknown, with the majority of investigations neglecting the possibility of within and across sensory modality enhancements. This is theoretically important, as a multisensory approach to understanding how training can modulate not only performance within a sense, but also in other senses (i.e., audition and crossmodal interactions), aligns better with real world processing. Furthermore, if training in one sensory modality can lead to concomitant enhancements in separate modalities, then this could be taken as evidence of a supramodal attentional system. Accordingly, the research conducted here further investigated the effects of musical training using tasks designed to measure spatial and temporal attention in auditory, visual, and crossmodal conditions. This is the first investigation to assess both spatial and temporal attention within and across sensory modalities using the same expert participants. Interestingly, results were mixed with expert musicians showing only marginal enhancements when compared with controls in auditory tasks, but with more significant enhancements for temporal and spatial processing in the visual modality, as well as overall lower detection thresholds for visual and crossmodal tasks. Furthermore, adding spatial cues to a temporal order judgment task increased temporal thresholds (i.e., made the task harder), but only when they occurred within the same modality as the task, as opposed to when presented in a different modality. Implications for design and future training studies are discussed.