Cortical inhibition effect in musicians and non-musicians using P300 with and without contralateral stimulation

Musicians have more robust and efficient neural responses in the cortical and sub-cortical regions, demonstrating that musical experience benefits the processing of both non-linguistic and linguistic stimuli.

This study aimed to verify P300's latency and amplitude behavioral using contralateral stimulation in musicians and non-musicians.

This was a case-control study. Subjects were divided in two groups: musicians, comprising 30 professional musicians, and non-musicians, comprising 25 subjects without musical experience.

The present study showed that the musicians had lower latencies and higher amplitudes than the non-musicians in the P300 without contralateral noise. For the P300 amplitude values, the difference between groups persisted, and the musicians presented significantly higher amplitude values compared with the non-musicians; additionally, the analysis of the noise effect on the P300 response showed that the latency values were significantly increased in the musicians.

The central auditory nervous system of musicians presents peculiar characteristics of electrophysiological responses probably due to the plasticity imposed by musical practice.