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Mu-band suppression reveals auditory-motor predictions after short motor training in non-musicians
Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom
Oscar Bedford Vilarrubias1 (oscar.bedford@mail.mcgill.ca), Alberto Ara1, Jérémie Ginzburg1,2, Philippe Albouy2, Robert Zatorre1, Virginia Penhune3; 1Montreal Neurological Institute, 2CERVO Research Center, 3Concordia University
Auditory-motor coupling is an important brain system that supports speech and music. It is now widely accepted that this system is bidirectional and that the motor component routinely streamlines auditory perception. For instance, prior literature has shown the presence of motor activity during passive listening to known melodies, and our lab recently demonstrated with TMS that this activity is anticipatory, occurs in non-musicians, and can be elicited at the single note level after a single motor training session. However, the associated note-by-note oscillatory dynamics remain unclear, especially in non-musicians. Other EEG studies have linked mu suppression to this phenomenon in musicians, but mu suppression has not been reliably observed in non-musicians at the single note level. To this end, we developed an EEG functional localizer using active and resting data to identify channels, frequencies, and timepoints that would be likely to showcase mu suppression during passive listening to a trained melody. We then applied a Generalized Linear Mixed Model to assess differences across passive listening conditions. We found significantly more mu suppression (-400ms to -100ms) preceding each tone during passive listening after motor training than in all other passive conditions. We found no significant effects in other timewindows or frequency bands, including the beta band. These findings show that mu suppression can be observed in non-musicians after a single training session at the individual note level, and align with the literature on the distinct roles of the alpha and beta components of the mu complex.
Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Audition