Wang Mengyuan, Hu Senlan, Liu Jinjun, Ai Mei, Kong Lingzhi
Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, National Demonstration Center for Experimental Psychology Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
Front Neurosci. 2025 Jun 17;19:1580045. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1580045. eCollection 2025.
The auditory fusion of binaural sounds and the perceived auditory image are determined by the similarities of the sounds at the two ears. Sensitivity to the change in interaural correlation, a measure of interaural similarity, is crucial to extract target sound from noisy background. Although musicians have been found to perform better than non-musicians in various types of auditory processing tasks such as frequency discrimination or temporal resolution, the relationship between musical training and the interaural correlation processing remains poorly understood.
Here we embedded a fragment of interaurally uncorrelated noises (interaural correlation = 0) into the interaurally identical marker noises (interaural correlation = 1) and constructed a binaural gap based on the change in interaural correlation (from 1 to 0 then back to 1). The minimum duration of interaurally uncorrelated fragment for detecting the binaural gap (duration threshold) was determined for groups of young adults without musical training and those who started musical training early (before 7 years of age) or late (after 8 years of age).
When the binaural noises arrived simultaneously (Experiment 1), we found that the duration threshold was significantly correlated with the onset age of musical training for the early-trained musicians but no such significant correlation was observed for the late-trained musicians. Moreover, the duration thresholds for the early-trained musicians were significantly shorter than those for both the late-trained musicians and non-musicians. When interaural delay was introduced (Experiment 2), this early-musical-training-related enhancement in interaural correlation processing was maintained for binaural noises when the interaural delay was 2 ms, while no enhancement was found when the interaural delay was 4 ms.
Our findings suggest that sensitivity to dynamic changes in interaural correlation might be influenced by musical training in early childhood, implying a sensitive period when musical training has a significant impact on interaural correlation processing.
双耳声音的听觉融合以及所感知的听觉图像由两耳声音的相似性决定。对耳间相关性变化（一种耳间相似性的度量）的敏感性对于从嘈杂背景中提取目标声音至关重要。尽管已发现音乐家在各种听觉处理任务（如频率辨别或时间分辨率）中比非音乐家表现更好，但音乐训练与耳间相关性处理之间的关系仍知之甚少。
在此，我们将一段耳间不相关噪声片段（耳间相关性 = 0）嵌入到耳间相同的标记噪声（耳间相关性 = 1）中，并基于耳间相关性的变化（从1到0然后再回到1）构建一个双耳间隙。针对未接受音乐训练的年轻成年人组以及那些早期（7岁之前）或晚期（8岁之后）开始音乐训练的人，确定检测双耳间隙的耳间不相关片段的最短持续时间（持续时间阈值）。
当双耳噪声同时到达时（实验1），我们发现早期接受音乐训练的音乐家的持续时间阈值与音乐训练的起始年龄显著相关，但晚期接受音乐训练的音乐家未观察到这种显著相关性。此外，早期接受音乐训练的音乐家的持续时间阈值明显短于晚期接受音乐训练的音乐家和非音乐家。当引入耳间延迟时（实验2），当耳间延迟为2毫秒时，这种与早期音乐训练相关的耳间相关性处理增强在双耳噪声中得以维持，而当耳间延迟为4毫秒时未发现增强。
我们的研究结果表明，对耳间相关性动态变化的敏感性可能受到幼儿期音乐训练的影响，这意味着存在一个敏感期，在此期间音乐训练对耳间相关性处理有显著影响。
