Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Long-term musical training enhances cognitive efficiency in processing music- and speech-related sounds, particularly in timbre, frequency, and temporal structure. However, the perception of underwater acoustic signals characterized by complex spectra and strong noise in musicians remains largely unexplored. We compared electroencephalography (EEG) responses of musicians and non-musicians during underwater acoustic detection tasks. Although no significant group differences were observed in event-related potentials, musicians exhibited stronger theta–alpha synchronization and more focal information flow under high task demands. Network analyses further revealed that musicians' timbre perception was associated with strengthened connectivity between the precuneus and visual cortex, whereas non-musicians relied on more distributed default-mode network pathways. Moreover, musical expertise could be decoded from combined EEG spatiotemporal and spatiospectral features with an accuracy of 82.77%. These findings suggest that musical training shapes network-level information routing during underwater acoustic perception, rather than altering early sensory encoding. Keywords:underwater acoustic target signal; auditory specificity; EEG; musical training; timbre; frequency