In this study, we aim for a thorough characterization of anatomical (e.g., Bengtsson et al., 2005) and functional (e.g., Pinho et al., 2014) brain plasticity associated with musical expert working memory (Masse et al., 2019). We will examine how brain changes are related to behavioral changes derived from skill acquisition (Lövdén et al., 2020) in general cognitive systems, such as the frontoparietal network for WM (Koenigs et al., 2009), and brain structures particularly relevant for musical expertise, such as the auditory system and multi-sensory integration systems (Herholz et al., 2012). In other words, we are interested in how long-term deliberate practice affects WM mechanisms.

Among others, this project investigates the following fundamental aspects:

• A two-stage has been proposed for expertise acquisition: from decreased activation to brain reorganization (Guida et al., 2012). Stimulation in the dorsal pathway causally enhances auditory WM performance (Albouy et al., 2017, 2022) and learning (Whittaker et al., 2024), suggesting supramodality of neural entrainment at least in the short term. This raises the question of whether and how long-term musical training induces changes in these structures and networks.
• Our behavioral characterization (Study 1) shows that musicians have a superior WM ability specific to musical materials across the auditory and visual modalities. In other words, expert WM is domain-specific and multimodal. An interesting question is whether expert musicians rely on enhanced multimodal representations of domain-specific (musical) stimuli. 
• Research supports the hypothesis that expert WM involves the development of cognitive strategies such as chunking (Gobet, 2007) and establishing more efficient connections with long-term memory (LTM) systems (Cantor et al., 1993; Ericsson et al., 1999). We will examine the structural and functional connectivity between the auditory and visual systems, as well as between the WM and LTM systems.

We will perform an integrated series of experiments using 7 Tesla structural and functional MRI at the Cooperative Brain Imaging Center (CoBIC) in Frankfurt to address these questions and derived hypotheses. In our functional tasks, we will examine the BOLD signal in our delayed match-to-sample WM paradigm developed and validated in Study 1. Healthy adult musicians and non-musicians matched in demographics and non-musical WM, with performance above chance level in the musical tasks, will participate in two scanning sessions on separate days, one dedicated to visual WM and the other to auditory WM. In each session, participants perform the maintenance and manipulation tasks without distractors (see Study 1) using melodies and letter sequences in alternating blocks.