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Effects of musical expertise on the early right anterior negativity: An event-related brain potential study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2002

STEFAN KOELSCH
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Leipzig, Germany Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
BJÖRN-HELMER SCHMIDT
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Leipzig, Germany
JULIA KANSOK
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Leipzig, Germany Institute of General Psychology, Leipzig, Germany
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Abstract

Event-related brain potentials in response to harmonically inappropriate chords were compared for musical experts and novices. Similar to previous studies, these chords elicited an early right anterior negativity (ERAN). The amplitude of the ERAN was clearly larger for musical experts than for novices, presumably because experts had more specific musical expectancies than novices. Chords with a physically deviant timbre elicited a mismatch negativity that did not differentiate the groups, indicating that the larger ERAN in experts was not due to a general enhanced auditory sensitivity. The ERAN reflects fast and automatic neural mechanisms that process complex musical (music-syntactic) irregularities, and the present results indicate that these mechanisms can be modulated by expertise.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2002 Society for Psychophysiological Research

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