Fig. 1.

Effects of attention and musicianship on the variability of cortical auditory-evoked responses. (A) Differences in response variability to ignored and attended stimuli in musicians and nonmusicians are plotted at each recording site. Because differences were calculated by subtracting attend from ignore variability, positive values (red) indicate a decrease in variability in responses to the attended relative to the ignored stimuli. (B) Electrode sites shared across all age groups are labeled. Red denotes sites for which musicians and nonmusicians differed with regard to response variability with attention. (C) The mean change in variability over FP1 and FP2 recording sites with attention is plotted for each age group (ignore variability minus attend variability). School-aged child and adult musicians demonstrate more distinct prefrontal response variability with attention than nonmusicians. ∼P < 0.10; *P < 0.05; **P < 0.01; ***P < 0.001. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of the article.)