Exploring Visual Attention in Musicians: Temporal, Spatial and Capacity Considerations

Exploring Visual Attention in Musicians: Temporal, Spatial and Capacity Considerations Ahnate Lim (ahnate@hawaii.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa 2530 Dole Street, Honolulu, HI 96822 USA Scott Sinnett (ssinnett@hawaii.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa 2530 Dole Street, Honolulu, HI 96822 USA Abstract Plasticity can also be seen in attentional and perceptual mechanisms of populations not suffering any sensory loss, with many recent findings indicating that modulation can occur as a side effect of particular daily activities or hobbies. For instance, a recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study found video-game players to have more prefrontal cortex activity during complex non- gaming tasks when compared with non-players, a change attributed to the demands on spatial attention while training with video games (Granek, Gorbet, & Sergio, 2010). Dovetailing with this finding, behavioral experiments suggest enhanced performance, including greater availability of attentional resources on various paradigms such as multiple object-tracking, enumeration, perceptual load, and the Attentional Network Test (ANT, see Posner & Rothbart, 2007; Dye, Green, & Bavelier, 2009; for review see I. Spence & Feng, 2010). One might ask then whether regular practice of other more ancient and ubiquitous activities, such as musical performance, would also result in augmentation of specific information processing capabilities in musicians? Indeed, the topic of non-musical benefits from musical exposure has seen considerable research (not in the least due to public interest and popular notions such as the “Mozart effect”), with results suggesting enhancements in areas such as mathematics, language, spatial abilities, and memory. However, many of these ‘listening’ experiments (e.g., Rauscher, Shaw, & Ky, 1993) involved performing tasks after listening to excerpts of classical music, and have generally provided inconclusive evidence, with follow-up studies showing only limited effects, or effects accountable to mood arousal or other indirect factors (Schellenberg, 2001; Steele et al., 1999; Thompson, Schellenberg, & Husain, 2001). Other studies take a different approach by instead comparing expert musicians to non-musicians to ascertain possible effects of long term musical training. A study by Helmbold and colleagues (2005), for example, compared 70 musicians to non-musicians on psychometric assessments of intelligence and general mental abilities, and found that musicians performed better on two tasks: flexibility of closure (detecting single elements in complex objects), and perceptual speed (finding letters amongst digits). The authors speculated that the better performance on perceptual speed tasks could be explained by the demands of musical Considerable evidence converges on how attention can be modulated through training (e.g., video game playing). While previous research suggests that musical training can modulate early perceptual and attentional processes, no single investigation to date has been conducted on the same participants to measure specific mechanisms of attention (temporal, spatial, and capacity) in musicians. In Experiment 1 we used a temporal order judgment (TOJ) task with both exogenous and endogenous cues in order to measure temporal and spatial attention. In Experiment 2, a cued-target detection task was presented with a concurrent high load task to assess capacity processing in musicians. Of the three measures, musicians performed better than controls on two, demonstrating a lower threshold for judging temporal order in addition to increased capabilities to process distracting information despite attentional resources being largely depleted. Together, these results provide novel findings on multiple aspects of attention in musicians. Keywords: attention, musician, plasticity, temporal order judgment, spatial, capacity, exogenous, endogenous Introduction Attention is a fundamental cognitive mechanism that enables humans to select the most crucial information from a constant array of sensory input, thereby allowing for efficient and effective functioning. Interestingly, exposure to particular experiences has been shown to modulate various aspects of human attention, as seen from evidence at both the behavioral and neurological levels. Recent neurological evidence suggests that brain functioning involves distributive processing and plastic characteristics (Mercado, 2008; Mesulam, 1990). For instance, this “plasticity” of the brain can be seen in common interactions across sensory modalities (Shimojo & Shams, 2001), when adapting to particular conditions such as age, disease, stress, and even addiction (Kolb, Gibb, & Robinson, 2003), or even in congenitally blind adults, as a study by Roder et al. (1999) revealed greater peripheral spatial localization abilities and more finely tuned early attentional mechanisms when compared to blindfolded controls. These and other studies suggest not only that the brain can partially compensate for losses in one modality through enhancements in another (for an example of tactile compensation, see Borsook et al., 1998), but also that attentional mechanisms can be correspondingly modulated.