Musicians' edge: A comparison of auditory processing, cognitive abilities and statistical learning.

Musicians' edge: A comparison of auditory processing, cognitive abilities and statistical learning.
Hear Res. 2016 Oct 19;:
Authors: Mandikal Vasuki PR, Sharma M, Demuth K, Arciuli J
Abstract
It has been hypothesized that musical expertise is associated with enhanced auditory processing and cognitive abilities. Recent research has examined the relationship between musicians' advantage and implicit statistical learning skills. In the present study, we assessed a variety of auditory processing skills, cognitive processing skills, and statistical learning (auditory and visual forms) in age-matched musicians (N = 17) and non-musicians (N = 18). Musicians had significantly better performance than non-musicians on frequency discrimination, and backward digit span. A key finding was that musicians had better auditory, but not visual, statistical learning than non-musicians. Performance on the statistical learning tasks was not correlated with performance on auditory and cognitive measures. Musicians' superior performance on auditory (but not visual) statistical learning suggests that musical expertise is associated with an enhanced ability to detect statistical regularities in auditory stimuli.
PMID: 27770623 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Source: Hearing Research - October 18, 2016 Category: Audiology Authors: Mandikal Vasuki PR, Sharma M, Demuth K, Arciuli J Tags: Hear Res Source Type: research