Putkinen Vesa, Saarikivi Katri, Chan Tsz Man Vanessa, Tervaniemi Mari
Turku PET Centre, University of Turku, Turku, Finland.
Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
Eur J Neurosci. 2021 May 1. doi: 10.1111/ejn.15262.
Previous work suggests that musical training in childhood is associated with enhanced executive functions. However, it is unknown whether this advantage extends to selective attention-another central aspect of executive control. We recorded a well-established event-related potential (ERP) marker of distraction, the P3a, during an audio-visual task to investigate the maturation of selective attention in musically trained children and adolescents aged 10-17 years and a control group of untrained peers. The task required categorization of visual stimuli, while a sequence of standard sounds and distracting novel sounds were presented in the background. The music group outperformed the control group in the categorization task and the younger children in the music group showed a smaller P3a to the distracting novel sounds than their peers in the control group. Also, a negative response elicited by the novel sounds in the N1/MMN time range (~150-200 ms) was smaller in the music group. These results indicate that the music group was less easily distracted by the task-irrelevant sound stimulation and gated the neural processing of the novel sounds more efficiently than the control group. Furthermore, we replicated our previous finding that, relative to the control group, the musically trained children and adolescents performed faster in standardized tests for inhibition and set shifting. These results provide novel converging behavioral and electrophysiological evidence from a cross-modal paradigm for accelerated maturation of selective attention in musically trained children and adolescents and corroborate the association between musical training and enhanced inhibition and set shifting.
先前的研究表明，童年时期的音乐训练与增强的执行功能有关。然而，这种优势是否延伸到选择性注意——执行控制的另一个核心方面，目前尚不清楚。我们在一项视听任务中记录了一种成熟的与分心相关的事件相关电位（ERP）标记物P3a，以研究10至17岁接受音乐训练的儿童和青少年以及未接受训练的同龄对照组中选择性注意的成熟情况。该任务要求对视觉刺激进行分类，同时在背景中呈现一系列标准声音和分散注意力的新声音。音乐组在分类任务中的表现优于对照组，并且音乐组中的年幼儿童对分散注意力的新声音的P3a比对照组中的同龄人更小。此外，音乐组中由新声音在N1/MMN时间范围（约150 - 200毫秒）引发的负反应也更小。这些结果表明，与对照组相比，音乐组更不容易被与任务无关的声音刺激分散注意力，并且对新声音的神经处理进行了更有效的门控。此外，我们重复了我们之前的发现，即相对于对照组，接受音乐训练的儿童和青少年在抑制和定势转换的标准化测试中表现得更快。这些结果从跨模态范式中提供了新的行为和电生理证据，证明接受音乐训练的儿童和青少年的选择性注意加速成熟，并证实了音乐训练与增强的抑制和定势转换之间的关联。
