Broca's area supports enhanced visuospatial cognition in orchestral musicians

Sluming, Vanessa, Brooks, Jonathan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3335-6209, Howard, Matthew, Downes, John Joseph and Roberts, Neil (2007) Broca's area supports enhanced visuospatial cognition in orchestral musicians. Journal of Neuroscience, 27 (14). pp. 3799-3806. ISSN 0270-6474

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Abstract

We provide neurobehavioral evidence supporting the transferable benefit of music training to alter brain function and enhance cognitive performance in a nonmusical visuospatial task in professional orchestral musicians. In particular, orchestral musicians' performance on a three-dimensional mental rotation (3DMR) task exhibited the behavioral profile normally only attained after significant practice, supporting the suggestion that these musicians already possessed well developed neural circuits to support 3DMR. Furthermore, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that only orchestral musicians showed significantly increased activation in Broca's area, in addition to the well known visuospatial network, which was activated in both musicians and nonmusicians who were matched on age, sex, and verbal intelligence. We interpret these functional neuroimaging findings to reflect preferential recruitment of Broca's area, part of the neural substrate supporting sight reading and motor-sequence organization underpinning musical performance, to subserve 3DMR in musicians. Our data, therefore, provide convergent behavioral and neurofunctional evidence supporting the suggestion that development of the sight-reading skills of musical performance alters brain circuit organization which, in turn, confers a wider cognitive benefit, in particular, to nonmusical visuospatial cognition in professional orchestral musicians.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	broca's area,cognition,human,mental rotation,musician,visuospatial,neuroscience(all) ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/2800
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	07 Sep 2022 11:32
Last Modified:	21 Oct 2022 01:35
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/87810
DOI:	10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0147-07.2007

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