A Comparison of Musicians and Nonmusicians from a Functional Connectivity Perspective

Poster Session B - Sunday, April 14, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Nicolas Adams¹ (adamsni19@students.ecu.edu), Sunghan Kim¹; ¹East Carolina University, Department of Engineering

It has been theorized for decades that musical training as a child can increase mental capabilities in many areas and has been shown to influence structural changes in the brain as well. Music has a profound impact on the human psyche and can be a powerful anti-amnestic. It has found use in musical therapy where music can not only temporarily jog memories of patients with dementias such as Alzheimer's disease, but also augment the patient’s emotions for hours or days after they have forgotten the encounter with their therapist. Since music has such a profound effect on the human mind, there is logic to posit that there may be a connection between musical training and cognitive development and structure. Utilizing a 32-electrode EEG cap, 20 subjects: 10 musicians and 10 nonmusicians were scanned during an oddball paradigm to elicit ERP waveforms. Each subject listened to two noise conditions: white noise and classical music. wPLI adjacency matrices were created for each condition. A difference between conditions were taken after for each population to perform statistical analyses on the difference in functional connectivity levels. It is hypothesized that musicians will display higher activation levels in functional connectivity between the conditions compared to the nonmusicians because musicians activate and engage more portions of their brains during musical perception. Data on each population's characteristic path lengths, clustering coefficient, centrality, and assortativity will also be addressed.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory