Schedule of Events | Symposia

Musical Training Impacts Hippocampal Connectivity Patterns Underlying Complex Event Encoding

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Mikaila Tombe¹, Rebecca Scheurich¹, Jamie Snytte¹, Caroline Palmer¹, Signy Sheldon¹; ¹McGill University

Behavioural research has suggested that musical training enhances one’s ability to engage in mental imagery, particularly when that imagery is auditory in nature. Given that encoding complex events, from autobiographical experiences to narrated stories, relies on imagery, we reasoned that musicians should encode such events differently than their non-musician counterparts. Based on prior work indicating that musicianship alters the integrity of the hippocampus, the central brain structure for encoding memories, we tested whether musicians engage different hippocampal connectivity patterns as they encode complex events. We further aimed to understand if musician-specific hippocampal connectivity patterns would present differently for events that relied on distinct forms of imagery (i.e. visual, auditory) or conceptual information. In an MRI scanner, musician (N=20) and non-musician (N=17) participants encoded three narrated events that were described to induce either conceptual, visual, or auditory-based images. We extracted anterior and posterior hippocampal connectivity patterns for each narration condition and compared these as a function of group (musician, non-musician) with mean-centered task PLS analysis. The results indicated reliable differences between the groups in both anterior and posterior hippocampal subregion connectivity patterns, but as a function of narration condition. There was one pattern that distinguished between the groups across the conceptual and visually described narrations, while another hippocampal connectivity pattern distinguished between these groups uniquely for the auditory narration condition. Thus, musicianship impacts how the hippocampus is functionally engaged when encoding complex events, and uniquely so for events that may evoke auditory imagery.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic