Classical conditioned responses to absent tones

• Main Authors: Häusler Udo, Jürgens Uwe, Bangert Marc, Altenmüller Eckart
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: BMC 2006-08-01
• Series: BMC Neuroscience
• Online Access: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/7/60

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Recent evidence for a tight coupling of sensorimotor processes in trained musicians led to the question of whether this coupling extends to preattentively mediated reflexes; particularly, whether a classically conditioned response in one of the domains (auditory) is generalized to another (tactile/motor) on the basis of a prior association in a second-order Pavlovian paradigm. An eyeblink conditioning procedure was performed in 17 pianists, serving as a model for overlearned audiomotor integration, and 14 non-musicians. Results: During the training session, subjects were conditioned to respond to auditory stimuli (piano tones). During a subsequent testing session, when subjects performed keystrokes on a silent piano, pianists showed significantly higher blink rates than non-musicians.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These findings suggest a tight coupling of the auditory and motor domains in musicians, pointing towards training-dependent mechanisms of strong cross-modal sensorimotor associations even on sub-cognitive processing levels.</p>