article review 37

Neural correlates of audiovisual integration in music reading

The current study has implications for our understanding of AV integration in music, specifically the effect of training on the integration of auditory and written music. While both early and late stages of AV integration seem to depend on expertise, the relationship between expertise and early/late integration differs. Early intoprocessing, understanding the visual stimulus helps guide pre-attentive auditory perceptionan dexpectations. Later intoprocessing, there is a super additivecongruency effect, as the P300 is sensitive to both auditory and visual deviants. Training increases the congruency effect, as musicians with more training show larger P300 stocongruent deviants.This suggests that the congruency of the deviants which is meaningful to those with mu- sicaltraining leads to the observed super additivity. Taken  together, continued musical training and experience with musical notation shapes the way the brain processes these abstract sound-symbol pairings, much like the development and mastery of linguistic reading.