Musical Expertise Increases Top–Down Modulation Over Hippocampal Activation during Familiarity Decisions

Musical Expertise Increases Top–Down Modulation Over Hippocampal Activation during Familiarity Decisions

The hippocampus has classically been associated with episodic memory, but is sometimes also recruited during semantic memory tasks, especially for the skilled exploration of familiar information. Cognitive control mechanisms guiding semantic memory search may benefit from the set of cognitive processes at stake during musical training. Here, we examined using functional magnetic resonance imagi...

Flexible Decisions and Chess Expertise

Adjusting our behavior to the changing demands of the environment requires flexible decision mechanisms. In an analysis of more than 91,000 chess games, an original research effort now suggests that performance is correlated with a player's ability to adjust its decision criteria to meet the varying degrees of complexity observed throughout a match (Sigman et al., 2010). Chess has always captiv...

Musical Expertise and Statistical Learning of Musical and Linguistic Structures

Adults and infants can use the statistical properties of syllable sequences to extract words from continuous speech. Here we present a review of a series of electrophysiological studies investigating (1) Speech segmentation resulting from exposure to spoken and sung sequences (2) The extraction of linguistic versus musical information from a sung sequence (3) Differences between musicians and n...

Musical Expertise and Melodic Structure in Memory for Musical Notation

Musical expertise and foreign speech perception

The aim of this experiment was to investigate the influence of musical expertise on the automatic perception of foreign syllables and harmonic sounds. Participants were Cuban students with high level of expertise in music or in visual arts and with the same level of general education and socio-economic background. We used a multi-feature Mismatch Negativity (MMN) design with sequences of either...