What is less clear from this literature is how specific changes in certain portions of the motor networks are related to specific motor abilities, or to the nature of the motor abilities themselves (timing, sequencing, fine motor control, multijoint coordination, etc.) and what the underlying mechanisms of expansion of cortical areas on the cellular and molecular level are (Buonomano and Merzenich, 1998; Zatorre et al., 2012). There is also evidence of structural changes in the motor

network due to musical training from longitudinal training studies: in their training study, Hyde et al. (2009) also found effects of piano training on the primary motor hand area and on the corpus callosum, which were related to performance on a motor sequencing task, thereby again demonstrating the behavioral relevance of the observed cortical changes. The development of some motor skills might be particularly sensitive Regorafenib clinical trial to early training (Penhune, 2011), but training effects can still be seen Selleck Trichostatin A in adults, and on shorter time scales. These short-term studies show effects mostly regarding functional activity. Lahav et al.

(2007) taught nonmusicians to play a familiar melody on the piano over the course of five days and measured their cortical activity using fMRI during listening to the trained and untrained melodies. Subjects showed increased activity in the motor network including ventral premotor and parietal areas during listening to the trained melodies compared to the untrained ones, presumably due to coactivation of motor areas Fossariinae during auditory perception reflecting new sound-action (piano-keystroke) associations. The roles of the ventral and dorsal parts of the premotor cortex in musical training were further elucidated in a recent study by Chen et al. (2012), in which participants learned to play a short melody on a piano within a single (albeit long) fMRI scanning session. The results revealed that dorsal premotor cortex, which is thought to be involved in abstract conditional sensorimotor associations (Hoshi and Tanji, 2007; Petrides, 1985), was only

active after participants had successfully learned to play the melody and had established a representation of the key-sound mapping; the ventral part, which is typically involved in more direct sensory-motor mapping (Zatorre et al., 2007), showed decreased activity over the course of the training, in particular for the specific trained sequence, indicating its role in the initial learning of the motor sequence. Because auditory and motor function are closely linked in musical performance, it seems plausible that training should not only affect those modalities separately, but also their interactions (e.g., Bangert et al., 2006; Chen et al., 2008a, 2008b; Haueisen and Knösche, 2001; Phillips-Silver and Trainor, 2007; Schulz et al.