Table 1.
Primary instruments, training, and onset of training for the musician group.
Fig 1.
Multiple object tracking task.
(A) Cue phase: Target dots, between 1 to 5, are marked in green for 2 seconds to designate them as targets for the tracking task. (B) Tracking phase: target dots turn back to grey. All of the dots, now identical, move around randomly on the display for 7 seconds. (C) Response phase: subjects report the final locations of the target dots and receive feedback on correct and incorrect choices (grey dot with red outline = incorrect selection, green dot with black outline = target dot but not selected, and green dot with red outline = target dot and selected).
Fig 2.
Panel A: Individual target-to-masker ratio at threshold (TMR) for musicians (red squares) and non-musicians (blue triangles) measured in colocated and separated configurations. Panel B: Group mean TMRs for conditions shown in panel A. Error bars are ±1 standard error of the mean. *Statistically significant group difference at 0.05 level (2 tailed).
Table 2.
Group characteristics of musicians and non-musicians for cognitive tasks.
Statistically significant group differences are highlighted in bold (p<0.01).
Fig 3.
Performance of musicians and non-musicians in the multiple object tracking (MOT) task.
Group mean tracking capacity data for musicians (red squares) and non-musicians (blue triangles). Error bars show ±1 standard error of the mean.
Fig 4.
Panel A: Scatter plot shows spatial release from masking (SRM = colocated—separated thresholds) plotted against digit span backwards score for individual subjects. Panel B: Scatter plot shows SRM plotted against tracking capacity for ndots = 3. Solid line shows least-squares fit to the data points.
Table 3.
Predictive model of spatial release from masking and separated thresholds based on tracking capacity (TC, for ndots = 3) and listener group (LG) as predictor variables.