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    • The application of this same paradigm to children revealed t

    2018-11-09

    The application of this verbascoside same paradigm to children revealed that attention\'s effect on response variability increases with age (Strait et al., 2014a), from ages three to 35, and may provide an objective index of the development of selective attention and inhibitory control. The development of this effect may be shaped by training and sensory enrichment, such as that associated with music training: in adults, the degree to which attention decreases prefrontal response variability relates to musicianship (Strait and Kraus, 2011a). Whereas musicians and nonmusicians demonstrate equivalent variability in responses across the majority of the scalp, only musically-trained adults demonstrate decreases in prefrontal response variability with attention (Strait and Kraus, 2011a). Attention-related enhancements in musicians’ auditory-evoked activity have also been reported by other laboratories using alternate cortical metrics, including mismatch negativity (Besson et al., 2011; Putkinen et al., 2013b; Tervaniemi et al., 2009) and the magnitude of late cortical auditory-evoked responses (Zendel and Alain, 2011). Here we aimed to determine whether the auditory expertise engendered by music training during early childhood alters the development of this cortical index of selective auditory attention. To this end we assessed the between-trial variability of scalp-recorded auditory-evoked activity in 77 musicians and nonmusicians between the ages of three to 35. We hypothesized that music training during early childhood is associated with the development of strengthened neural networks underlying auditory attention during mid-childhood, following the stabilization of attention ability (∼age seven; Booth et al., 2003; Tipper et al., 1989). Supposing that differences between musicians and nonmusicians reflect their training, at least in part, we further predicted that: (1) young children just initiating music training would not yet demonstrate musician-associated enhancements and (2) the extent to which prefrontal response variability decreases with selective attention would be greater in children and adults with more years of musical practice relative to peers with less training.
    Methods
    Results Music training during early childhood was associated with the variability of prefrontal auditory-evoked responses recorded over the course of the selective auditory attention task. Like adults, school-aged musically-trained children had greater attentional effects on prefrontal response variability than their nonmusician peers. This effect of musicianship was not observed in preschool-aged musicians just initiating music training and may emerge with continued training and/or development. Furthermore, the extent to which prefrontal response variability decreased to attended relative to ignored speech increased with more years of musical practice in both school-aged children and, as reported in Strait and Kraus (2011a), adults.
    Discussion Our results reveal that the development of cortical mechanisms underlying selective auditory attention is associated with childhood music training. This work adds to rapidly accruing evidence for neurodevelopmental distinctions in children undergoing music training, who demonstrate heightened neural sensitivity to acoustic input (Chobert et al., 2011; Putkinen et al., 2014b) and more robust neural encoding of acoustic input (for review see Putkinen et al., 2013a; Strait and Kraus, 2014); longitudinal and cross-sectional efforts indicate that many of these effects may be training-dependent (Chobert et al., 2014; Kraus et al., 2014; Moreno and Besson, 2005; Moreno et al., 2009; Putkinen et al., 2014a; Strait et al., 2013). More specifically, the present results extend previous observations in musician adults to school-aged children, establishing that heightened attentional effects on auditory-evoked response variability over prefrontal cortex emerge in musicians during early childhood. That these effects are not observed in preschoolers just initiating music training may suggest no pre-existing differences in selective attention, as indexed by prefrontal response variability, between children who undergo music training from those who do not. Alternative explanations may be that innate predispositions are not yet apparent in preschoolers given their relatively undeveloped prefrontal cortex, or that distinctions were not observed in musician preschoolers because a large portion of this population received group music lessons rather than private instruction. Furthermore, it is notable that preschool musicians demonstrated decreased variability over one right temporal electrode site relative to preschool nonmusicians. Subsequent studies are necessary to determine whether this finding is replicable and, if so, whether it reflects innate predispositions or training-related malleability. Here we discuss developmental and practical implications of these data in the context of the neurobiological generators of response variability.