The dividing note- are musicians better at an online auditory and visual statistical learning task?

We investigated if long-term musical training is associated with facilitation of extraction of distributional cues in an online auditory statistical learning (ASL) and visual statistical learning (VSL) task. Participants were seventeen musicians and eighteen age-matched non-musicians. Event related potentials were recorded as participants listened to continuous pure tones in the ASL task or watched cartoons in the VSL task. The stimuli were organized into sets of triplets based on their distributional cues. ASL and VSL tasks were adapted from Abla et al., (2008, 2009) and Arciuli et al., (2011). Each participant listened to three 7 minute sessions of continuous triplet sequences. Participants also completed a surprise behavioural forced choice task to assess statistical learning. Musicians significantly outperformed non-musicians on the behavioural ASL but not the VSL task. Based on previous research (Abla et al 2008), triplet onset effect (subtraction of first and third tones) was used to indicate learning. Consistent with behavioural results, N400 area for triplet onset effect consistently decreased across the three sessions indicating better learning in musicians. In contrast, there was no N400 effect for the visual stimuli. Our results provide evidence for modality specific behavioural and electrophysiological changes during an online SL task in musicians.