Enhanced voice recognition in musicians

Abstract

Musicians typically have extensive auditory experience and demonstrate better pitch, timbre, and tempo discrimination compared to non-musicians. Musical training is also correlated with earlier and more robust cortical and subcortical responses to linguistic stimuli. We asked whether musical expertise may contribute to other auditory tasks, namely person and object recognition when both auditory and visual cues to identity are available. Musicians and non-musicians learned face-voice and car-horn “identity” pairs. Using a forced choice, old/new paradigm, participants were tested for recognition of the learned stimuli presented among distractor stimuli under three stimulus conditions (auditory only, visual only, and bimodal audiovisual). Compared to non-musicians, musicians were more sensitive at recognizing voices but not object sounds. Further, voice recognition sensitivity was positively correlated with both years of musical training and hours of weekly practice suggesting an influence of experience on performance. This differential performance for people and object stimuli is consistent with distinct neural substrates for face and object processing. Overall, this study demonstrates that experience in a sensory domain can benefit aspects of that sensory ability, such as voice but not object sound recognition, likely due to plasticity in distinct neural processing pathways.