Note that a possible role of the pulvinar in the processing of pitch over time has also been reported in other studies investigating music, namely during melody

generation (Brown et al., 2006), and scale playing during piano performance (Parsons et al., 2005). Notably the pulvinar is probably most known for its implication in visual attention (Petersen et al., 1987; Posner & Petersen, 1990), and contains neurons that generate signals related to the salience of visual objects (Robinson & Petersen, 1992). The current observation of the pulvinar thus suggests that it may either play a more general cross-modal role in attention, e.g. in emotional attention (Vuilleumier, 2005), or

it may be recruited by auditory processes, although it is part of the visual system. Such a recruitment of well-known ‘visual OSI-744 ic50 system areas’ by music processing is not uncommon. For example, musical mental transformation of scales and melodies draws on brain regions known to be involved in mental rotation in the visual domain (Foster & Zatorre, 2010; Zatorre et al., 2010). Furthermore, listening Selleck ATM/ATR inhibitor to music can evoke visual imagery (Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008), and visual imagery may facilitate multiple aspects of music performance (Keller, 2012). Such a correspondence between visual and musical processing is further substantiated by the finding that musicians trained in an early life-time window performed better on visual–motor synchronisation tasks than late-trained musicians (Bailey & Penhune,

2012). Note that, because the acquired anatomical values are a quite rough measure to determine inter-subject differences in brain organisation, it is to be expected that an investigation of individual differences in a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment with the same stimulus material would probably allow for a more detailed view of how the observed behavioral effects mafosfamide may correspond to functional networks. We complemented the main research goal above with calculations directly correlating valence for each condition with GMD. Of particular interest is the correlation of valence ratings of O with GMD, which showed higher GMD in parietal regions and temporal areas (Fig. 4A). Higher GMD in these regions is thus associated with higher valence ratings for the O. The observed inferior parietal lobe has previously been implicated in auditory spatial working memory (Alain et al., 2008), and musical pitch (Zatorre et al., 1994), and the adjacent intra-parietal sulcus has been shown to be involved in the mental transformation of scales and melodies (Foster & Zatorre, 2010; Zatorre et al., 2010).