Parameterized expertise: Evidence for gradations of musical expertise from electroencephalographic monitoring of auditory decision-making

Abstract

A musicians nervous system is thought to specialize to their mode of music production. For instance, the pianists control of hands and arms develops to facilitate greater dexterity at the keyboard, while the cellist develops control to play notes using both the fret board and/or bow. Our previous work, employing an anomalous musical event (AME) detection task, identified neural and behavioral correlates that differentiated between a specific class of musicians, cellists, and those without professional musical training and expertise. Here we investigate a fine-grain differentiation between musicians having different modes of musical production, specifically in terms of how these differences are manifested in the neural correlates identified in the AME task. We show, using electroencephalography (EEG), that both event related potentials (ERPs) and single-trial analysis of the EEG can grade musical expertise by mode of sound production. Important is that these fine-grained EEG correlates are observable absent any motor response or active music production by the individuals. We find evidence that these grades of expertise are mediated by different sensory-motor interactions emblematic of the sound production mode. More broadly, our results show that neural markers can both define types of musical expertise and decompose their source components when behavioral differences are either minute or indistinguishable.