In addition to enhancement in the development of the auditor

In addition to enhancement in the development of the auditory processing in the passive listening task, we showed that children involved with music training could detect deviations in pitch more accurately and showed larger amplitude P3 components in response to changes in tonal environment. The P3 component is thought to reflect neural events associated with immediate memory processes (Ladish and Polich, 1989; Polich, 2007) and is produced when subjects attend and discriminate histamine-2 receptor antagonist events which are different from one another on some dimension. P3 amplitude and latency are shown to be affected by subject age: amplitude tends to increase and peak latency decreases substantially from the ages of five to puberty when it stabilizes before amplitude decrements and latency increases in older age (Brown et al., 1983; Ladish and Polich, 1989; Polich and Burns, 1990). Previous studies have examined the effects of music training on P3 in adults (Nikjeh et al., 2008; Tervaniemi et al., 2005; Trainor Desjardins and Rockel, 1999) reporting both amplitude increases and latency decreases associated with long-term musical training. Our results replicated these findings in young children after only two years of training. We also found that there was a positive correlation, albeit not quite significant, between the magnitude of the P3 amplitude in the musical group and their enhanced accuracy in detecting deviant notes. Considering the number of participants in the music group, and the relatively strong correlation (r=0.43), it is reasonable to expect that this correlation may reach significance once we add further subjects. The presence of this association between behavior and P3 amplitude in the music group, but not in the comparison groups, may be related to the fact that the P3 in the auditory domain matures into its adulthood more quickly as a result of childhood music training. Several previous studies have found associations between P3 amplitude and target performance in adult populations (Polich, 2007). Given that our task involved matching two melodies – template and target – in order to detect tonal alterations, the differences of P3 amplitude between the music and comparison groups seems to reflect superior auditory template matching abilities in the music group. The fact that the neural difference between groups was specific to the P3 and not the earlier more sensory P2/N2 potentials points towards the improved performance being mediated through higher-level attentional and working memory processes. This may be a consequence of enhanced auditory working memory as a result of music training and possibly related to prior evidence of positive impact of music training on verbal memory (Chan et al., 1998; Franklin et al., 2008; Ho et al., 2003; Jakobson et al., 2008a,b). The relatively focal topography of the P3 component in the music group (Fig. 7) suggests the possibility that a generator close to the skull is involved, such as the premotor and/or motor cortices. A recent study indicated that early musical training is specifically linked to increased grey matter in the premotor cortices (Bailey et al., 2014). Also, it has been previously shown that in the adult musician’s brain the two networks are strongly linked and even when a task involves only auditory or only motor processing, co-activation phenomena within the respective brain areas can be expected (Haueisen and Knösche, 2001). Unexpectedly, we observed a significant difference in the amplitude of P1, N1 and P2 components between the sports and the other two groups in response to changes in pitch. Despite these differences, the sports group pitch detection accuracy was only 30%, worst among the three groups. Therefore the amplitude difference in the first 200ms range was unrelated to the conscious detection of musical deviations. Moreover, given the appearance of the ERP we find it most likely that the differences seen in the N1 and P2 components were mediated by the preceding P1 amplitude being increased. Indeed peak to peak analysis of N1 and P2 components showed that there were no group differences in the amplitude of N1 or P2.