Music training and auditory-visual detection: effects on reaction times, multisensory integration, modality-shifting, and selective attention

Music training is a prominent model of experience-dependent neuroplasticity, with frequent claims that it improves general cognitive abilities and music- and speech-related perceptual abilities. There have been few attempts to assess whether music training confers benefits for general, basic perceptual processes. Here, we assessed whether music training improves response times (RTs) to auditory, visual, and audiovisual stimuli and, via the race model inequality (RMI), whether music training increases the magnitude of audiovisual integration. We compared the RTs of 27 musicians and 27 nonmusicians to unimodal and bimodal flash-tone stimuli, across four tasks that differed only in their response requirements. One task assessed simple RT, two assessed go/no-go performance (i.e., a simple RT task where one of the unimodal modalities had to be ignored), and the fourth task assessed the Colavita visual dominance effect via speeded modality discrimination. Musicians had faster RTs to all sensory modalities across the four tasks, but this difference was only statistically significant in the go/no-go tasks. There was no significant difference between musicians and nonmusicians in their susceptibility to the Colavita effect and the modality shift effect, or in the magnitude of their RMI violations (as assessed at both the group and observer levels). Our results suggest that long-term multisensory expertise (music training) does not affect basic cross-modal sensory interactions that influence RTs, but that musicians may have an advantage for intersensory selective attention.