(2004) found that in school-aged children the reaction time in a visual task and the amplitude of a late negativity elicited by concurrently presented task-irrelevant novel sounds correlated positively (i.e. the longer the reaction times, the larger the RON responses), indicating that the late negativities elicited by novel sounds are also related to the amount of behavioural distraction caused by the unexpected sound in children. The current study shows that, in addition to novel-sound-elicited P3a, musical home activities are also associated with the reduction in this index of distractibility. It cannot be conclusively disentangled from correlational data whether

the relation between musical activities and the P3a and LDN/RON responses found in the current study is due to changes directly caused by such activities in the neural mechanism underlying these responses. For instance, children who are (perhaps inherently) more accurate buy Etoposide at detecting acoustic changes may be more predisposed to musical play and with their own behaviour encourage their parents to sing to them. However, regardless of the initial impetus that eventually led to the observed relationships, it stands to reason that functional changes induced by musical activities could Selleck Venetoclax be

a contributing factor. Firstly, although the auditory system remains malleable by experience throughout the life span, converging evidence from research on a variety of topics, such as the development of auditory processing after fitting of a cochlear implant (Eggermont & Ponton, 2003), the neural underpinnings of second language learning (Kuhl, 2004), and the effects of early blindness on cortical reorganization (Kujala et al., 2000), indicate that the auditory

system exhibits a high potential for functional plasticity in childhood. Furthermore, the animal literature indicates that an acoustically enriched environment leads to functional changes in auditory cortical areas especially in young animals (Zhang et al., 2001; Engineer et al., 2004). Recent longitudinal studies have provided convincing evidence that formal musical training can lead to functional and structural changes in the brain in childhood (Hyde et al., 2009; Moreno et al., 2009; Gerry et al., 2012). In addition, studies on the tuning of the auditory system to culturally ID-8 typical features of speech and music indicate that the auditory system shows long-term changes as a result of informal everyday exposure to sounds (Näätänen, 2001; Hannon & Trainor, 2007; Wong et al., 2011) and, further, that these changes may be specific to the most relevant deviance types/acoustic changes in speech vs. music (Tervaniemi et al., 2006, 2009). Although longitudinal studies are needed to conclusively resolve this issue, it seems reasonable that even informal musical experience in the form of musical play and parental singing might affect the responsiveness of the auditory system to acoustic changes.