Cortical inhibition effect in musicians and non-musicians using P300 with and without contralateral stimulation^{☆ ☆☆}

Introduction:

Musicians have more robust and efficient neural responses in the cortical and sub-cortical regions, demonstrating that musical experience benefits the processing of both non-linguistic and linguistic stimuli.

Objective:

This study aimed to verify P300's latency and amplitude behavioral using contralateral stimulation in musicians and non-musicians.

Methods:

This was a case-control study. Subjects were divided in two groups: musicians, comprising 30 professional musicians, and non-musicians, comprising 25 subjects without musical experience.

Results:

The present study showed that the musicians had lower latencies and higher amplitudes than the non-musicians in the P300 without contralateral noise. For the P300 amplitude values, the difference between groups persisted, and the musicians presented significantly higher amplitude values compared with the non-musicians; additionally, the analysis of the noise effect on the P300 response showed that the latency values were significantly increased in the musicians.

Conclusion:

The central auditory nervous system of musicians presents peculiar characteristics of electrophysiological responses probably due to the plasticity imposed by musical practice.

Electrophysiology; Event-related potentials, P300; Hearing; Music