• Alice Mado Proverbio, Matteo Cozzi, Andrea Orlandi, and Manuel Carminati.
• Milan Center for Neuroscience, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126 Milan, Italy. Electronic address: mado.proverbio@unimib.it.
• Neuroscience. 2017 Mar 27; 346: 309-319.

AbstractEvidences have been provided of a crucial role of multimodal audio-visuomotor processing in subserving the musical ability. In this paper we investigated whether musical audiovisual stimulation might trigger the activation of motor information in the brain of professional pianists, due to the presence of permanent gestures/sound associations. At this aim EEG was recorded in 24 pianists and naive participants engaged in the detection of rare targets while watching hundreds of video clips showing a pair of hands in the act of playing, along with a compatible or incompatible piano soundtrack. Hands size and apparent distance allowed self-ownership and agency illusions, and therefore motor simulation. Event-related potentials (ERPs) and relative source reconstruction showed the presence of an Error-related negativity (ERN) to incongruent trials at anterior frontal scalp sites, only in pianists, with no difference in naïve participants. ERN was mostly explained by an anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) source. Other sources included "hands" IT regions, the superior temporal gyrus (STG) involved in conjoined auditory and visuomotor processing, SMA and cerebellum (representing and controlling motor subroutines), and regions involved in body parts representation (somatosensory cortex, uncus, cuneus and precuneus). The findings demonstrate that instrument-specific audiovisual stimulation is able to trigger error shooting and correction neural responses via motor resonance and mirroring, being a possible aid in learning and rehabilitation.Copyright © 2017 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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