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Classical conditioned responses to absent tones.

Marc Bangert·Uwe Jürgens·Udo Häusler·Eckart Altenmüller
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Abstract

BACKGROUND: 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. CONCLUSION: 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.

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Acoustic StimulationAnimalsAuditory PerceptionBlinkingConditioning, ClassicalHearingHumansMusicSensitivity and SpecificityJournal ArticleResearch Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

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Marc Bangert, Uwe Jürgens, Udo Häusler, Eckart Altenmüller. 2006-08-17. Classical conditioned responses to absent tones.. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2202-7-60

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