Musical training also seems to affect the extent of cross-modal integration. In a successful musical performance, stimuli from several modalities have to be processed with high temporal selleck chemicals precision. Audio-visual integration involving tones and lights can be demonstrated even in musically untrained subjects (Elmer et al., 2012). However, the integration of the senses seems to be enhanced by musical training in relevant domains, as shown in increased neural responses

to simultaneous tactile and auditory input in trumpeters (Schulz et al., 2003), increased behavioral sensitivity and cortical responses to audio-visual asynchronies in musicians (Lee and Noppeney, 2011), and increased audiovisual integration in brainstem responses (Musacchia et al., 2007). Also, a recent multimodal training study showed that two weeks of piano training that involved visual, auditory, and sensorimotor modalities resulted in a stronger enhancement of audio-visual integration of stimuli in the posterior part of right STG than training that only involved the visual and auditory domains (Paraskevopoulos et al., 2012; Figure 1). Recent models of multisensory integration in superior colliculus (SC) suggest that integration is achieved by feedback

and feedforward synapses GSK1210151A manufacturer of the unisensory neurons with a multisensory area within the SC (Magosso et al., 2008). While additional

mechanisms and more complex integration might be at work in the cortex, the role of feedforward predictions from one modality to the other, Progesterone and evaluation of corresponding feedback between modalities has also been suggested as an important mechanism for the efficacy of musical training for cortical plasticity (Lee and Noppeney, 2011). Research from animals and computational models indicates that multisensory inputs during development are crucial for the formation of the corresponding neural multisensory integration networks (Cuppini et al., 2011). Conversely, research in blind and deaf humans shows how sensory deprivation leads to functional reorganization of the sensory cortical areas, but that these areas maintain their organizational principles in the process and are probably to a large extent multisensory in nature to begin with (Voss and Zatorre, 2012). From anatomical work, it is furthermore known that even early sensory cortical structures are connected to other sensory and association cortices, and that the auditory cortex receives multisensory thalamic inputs (Budinger et al., 2006; Budinger and Scheich, 2009). These anatomical connections provide a good basis for the assumption that predictions and evaluations via cross-modal feedforward and feedback loops are an important mechanism in multimodal learning such as playing a musical instrument.