Discrimination of time intervals in musicians and non-musicians: A multimodal approach

Musical expertise is acknowledged to lead to better performance in temporal discrimination. However, the ability to discriminate time intervals vary according to the modality that delimits the time interval, as well as the duration of the interval itself. In this study, we investigated the effect of musical training (16 musicians and 16 non-musicians) on the discrimination of empty time intervals with the combination of three types of sensory signals: auditory (A), visual (V), and tactile (T). Three intramodal conditions (AA, VV, TT) and six intermodal conditions (AT, AV, VA, VT, TA, VT) were used. All conditions were tested for two different durations, around 250 ms (sub-second range) and 1,250 ms (supra-second range). Overall, results indicate that the superiority of musicians over non-musicians is not limited to the AA condition, but extends to the VV, TT, and intermodal conditions, and this finding applies to both duration ranges. Also, performance levels were much more homogenous between the two range durations for musicians. Our findings support the idea that musical expertise acts on one general internal timing mechanism and highlight the different temporal discrimination levels associated with the use of different marker-type and duration-range conditions. Data for this experiment are available upon publication (https://osf.io/8rxmp).