Center for Music in the Brain, Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University & The Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus/Aalborg, Universitetsbyen 3, Building 1710, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark.
Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
Sci Rep. 2021 Feb 22;11(1):4324. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-83135-x.
Our sensory systems provide complementary information about the multimodal objects and events that are the target of perception in everyday life. Professional musicians' specialization in the auditory domain is reflected in the morphology of their brains, which has distinctive characteristics, particularly in areas related to auditory and audio-motor activity. Here, we combined diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) with a behavioral measure of visually induced gain in pitch discrimination, and we used measures of cortical thickness (CT) correlations to assess how auditory specialization and musical expertise are reflected in the structural architecture of white and grey matter relevant to audiovisual processing. Across all participants (n = 45), we found a correlation (p < 0.001) between reliance on visual cues in pitch discrimination and the fractional anisotropy (FA) in the left inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF), a structure connecting visual and auditory brain areas. Group analyses also revealed greater cortical thickness correlation between visual and auditory areas in non-musicians (n = 28) compared to musicians (n = 17), possibly reflecting musicians' auditory specialization (FDR < 10%). Our results corroborate and expand current knowledge of functional specialization with a specific focus on audition, and highlight the fact that perception is essentially multimodal while uni-sensory processing is a specialized task.
我们的感觉系统为日常生活中感知的多模态物体和事件提供了互补信息。专业音乐家在听觉领域的专长反映在他们大脑的形态上，其具有独特的特征，特别是在与听觉和音频运动活动相关的区域。在这里，我们将弥散张量成像（DTI）与视觉诱导音高辨别力增益的行为测量相结合，并使用皮质厚度（CT）相关性测量来评估听觉专业化和音乐专业知识如何反映在与视听处理相关的白质和灰质的结构架构中。在所有参与者（n=45）中，我们发现了一个依赖于音高辨别中的视觉线索与左侧下额枕束（IFOF）的分数各向异性（FA）之间的相关性（p<0.001），这是一个连接视觉和听觉大脑区域的结构。组分析还表明，与音乐家（n=17）相比，非音乐家（n=28）的视觉和听觉区域之间的皮质厚度相关性更大，这可能反映了音乐家的听觉专业化（FDR<10%）。我们的结果证实并扩展了目前对听觉功能专业化的知识，特别强调了感知本质上是多模态的，而单感官处理是一项专门的任务。
