Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Literature on sensory discrimination suggests that it relies on two separate abilities, one related to processing of auditory-temporal stimuli, and the other involved in processing non-temporal visual stimuli. Musical training is associated with structural and functional adaptations in the brain, which improve sensory processing. However, to date the advantage of musicians was particularly evident in the auditory and temporal tasks (as related with perception of music). This study aimed to investigate potential advantages of musicians not only in the ability to discriminate auditory and temporal stimuli, but also with regard to visual discrimination. As many as nine adaptive stimulus discrimination tasks were administered to 56 musicians and 54 non-musicians, with both groups matched on working memory capacity. The musicians displayed better discrimination scores in each modality, including the visual one. The results support the view of modality-independent perceptual benefits resulting from prolonged musical training.