Biomedical subjects

Maria Uther

Publications and source records attributed to Maria Uther.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Sound processing in amateur musicians and nonmusicians: event-related potential and behavioral indices.

To increase our understanding of auditory neurocognition in musicians, we compared nonmusicians with amateur band musicians in their neural and behavioral sound encoding accuracy. Mismatch negativity and P3a components of the auditory event-related potentials were recorded to changes in basic acoustic features (frequency, duration, location, intensity, gap) and abstract features (melodic contour and interval size). Mismatch negativity was larger in musicians than in nonmusicians for location changes whereas no statistically significant group difference was observed in response to other feature changes or in abstract-feature mismatch negativity. P3a was observed only in musicians in response to location changes. This suggests that when compared with nonmusicians, even amateur musicians have neural sound processing advantages with acoustic information most essential to their musical genre.

Behavior↗

PubMed2006

Training in Morse code enhances involuntary attentional switching to acoustic frequency: Evidence from ERPs.

This study examined the possibility that learning Morse code could result in cortical changes in processing of physical acoustic features, as indexed by the mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a components of the auditory event-related potential (ERP). ERPs were recorded in 9 subjects who were learning Morse code. The subjects were presented with auditory stimuli at 3 different times relative to their training (before, during and after). These stimuli were presented within an auditory 'oddball' paradigm, with repetitive standard stimuli interspersed by one of three infrequent deviant stimuli (duration, frequency or SOA). The data showed that there was a significant increase in the P3a only for frequency deviants as a function of training, whereas the MMN response was not affected by the training. These data are interpreted in terms of an attentional switching to unfamiliar changes that participants would not expect among the signals that they would grow to anticipate while receiving Morse code.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2003

Plastic cortical changes induced by learning to communicate with non-speech sounds.

With Morse code, an acoustic message is transmitted using combinations of tone patterns rather than the spectrally and temporally complex speech sounds that constitute the spoken language. Using MEG recordings of the mismatch negativity (MMN, an index of permanent auditory cortical representations of native language speech sounds), we probed the dominant hemisphere for the developing Morse code representations in adult Morse code learners. Initially, the MMN to the Morse coded syllables was, on average, stronger in the hemisphere opposite to the one dominant for the MMN to native language speech sounds. After a training period of 3 months, the pattern reversed, however: the mean Morse code MMN became lateralized to the hemisphere that was predominant for the speech-sound MMN. This suggests that memory traces for the Morse coded acoustic language units develop within the hemisphere that already accommodates the permanent traces for natural speech sounds. These plastic changes manifest, presumably, the close associations formed between the neural representations of the tone patterns and phonemes.

Acoustic Stimulation↗