Musical Expertise Influences the Processing of Short and Long Auditory Time Intervals: An EEG Study

Musical expertise has been proven to be beneficial for time perception abilities, with musicians outperforming non-musicians in several explicit timing tasks. However, it is unclear how musical expertise impacts implicit time perception. Twenty non-musicians and fifteen expert musicians participated in an EEG recording during a passive auditory oddball paradigm with .8- and 1.6-s standard time intervals and deviant intervals that were either played earlier or delayed relative to the standard interval.

We first confirmed that, as was the case for non-musicians, musicians use different neurofunctional processes to support the perception of short (below 1.2 s) and long (above 1.2 s) time intervals: while deviance detection for long intervals elicited a N1 component, P2 was associated with deviance detection for short time intervals. Interestingly, musicians did not elicit a CNV for longer intervals but show additional components of deviance detection such as i) an attention-related N1 component, even for deviants occurring during short intervals, ii) a N2 component for above and below 1.2-s deviance detection, and iii) a P2 component for above 1.2-s deviance detection.

We propose that the N2 component is a marker of explicit deviance detection, and acts as an inhibitory/conflict monitoring of the deviance. This hypothesis was supported by a positive correlation between CNV and N2 amplitudes observed in non-musicians: the CNV reflects the temporal accumulator and can predict explicit detection of the deviance. In expert musicians, a N2 component is observable without CNV, suggesting that deviance detection is optimized and does not require the temporal accumulator.

Overall, this study suggests that musical expertise is associated with optimized implicit time perception.