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Abstract
Musical training has been associated with structural changes in the brain as well
as functional differences in brain activity when musicians are compared to nonmusicians
on both perceptual and motor tasks. Previous neuroimaging comparisons of musicians
and nonmusicians in the motor domain have used tasks involving prelearned motor sequences
or synchronization with an auditorily presented sequence during the experiment. Here
we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine expertise-related differences
in brain activity between musicians and nonmusicians during improvisation--the generation
of novel musical-motor sequences--using a paradigm that we previously used in musicians
alone. Despite behaviorally matched performance, the two groups showed significant
differences in functional brain activity during improvisation. Specifically, musicians
deactivated the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) during melodic improvisation,
while nonmusicians showed no change in activity in this region. The rTPJ is thought
to be part of a ventral attentional network for bottom-up stimulus-driven processing,
and it has been postulated that deactivation of this region occurs in order to inhibit
attentional shifts toward task-irrelevant stimuli during top-down, goal-driven behavior.
We propose that the musicians' deactivation of the rTPJ during melodic improvisation
may represent a training-induced shift toward inhibition of stimulus-driven attention,
allowing for a more goal-directed performance state that aids in creative thought.