Electrophysiological evidence that musical experience affects spatial auditory perception.

Abstract

Musical experience is associated with enhanced auditory abilities, but it remains unclear how these benefits are expressed across different stages of spatial auditory processing. Therefore, we examined participants with and without musical experience using a spatial auditory oddball paradigm with multiple spatial deviations under both unattended and attended conditions. Behavioral performance, event-related potentials, and phase-locking value (PLV)-based functional connectivity were jointly analyzed to characterize spatial auditory processing at behavioral, local neural, and network levels. Participants with musical experience showed higher localization accuracy and faster reaction times. During unattended listening, they exhibited larger mismatch negativity (MMN) amplitudes and stronger functional connectivity, particularly across frontal, temporal, and parietal-occipital regions, whereas during attended listening, they showed larger P300 amplitudes and enhanced large-scale neural synchronization, particularly between frontal and parietal-occipital regions. Moreover, MMN and P300 amplitudes were significantly associated with behavioral performance, linking these neural responses to spatial auditory ability. Together, these converging findings suggest that musical experience is associated with enhanced sensitivity to spatial auditory changes, more efficient attention-dependent processing, and stronger coordination across distributed brain networks. These findings provide an integrated view of how musical experience shapes spatial auditory processing across different attentional states.