g., Lappe et al., 2008). Music has been used both as an active training protocol and as a stimulus in the context of purely auditory training. By comparing these different types of approaches we can shed some light on the extent of plastic changes due to

passive and active types of training and the roles and interactions of the brain areas involved. Here, we will focus on neuroscientific findings in humans using UMI-77 supplier behavioral and neuroimaging techniques. We provide a short overview of the advantages and disadvantages of the various imaging techniques in Table 1. While the many possible mechanisms underlying structure-function relationships with neuroimaging methods are far from being understood (Zatorre et al., 2012), the multimodal nature of the data in this domain provides many testable hypotheses. It is well established from neurophysiological studies in animals that changes in auditory cortical responses can be elicited by either long-term or short-term exposure to specific, structured sounds. This literature is beyond Cell Cycle inhibitor our scope here, but it is important to point out some general features of these findings that are relevant to the cognitive neuroscience of music.

First, it is well known that that there are long-term changes to map properties of auditory cortex as a function of exposure to specific stimuli (Ahissar et al., 1998; Bao et al., 2004; Bergan et al., 2005; Bieszczad and Weinberger, 2010; Gutfreund and Knudsen, 2006; Linkenhoker and Knudsen, 2002; Mercado et al., 2001; Polley et al., 2006). These changes take many forms depending on the behavioral paradigm used (classical conditioning, stimulus-response

learning, perceptual learning, etc.) and can involve changes to both receptive field properties and to temporal aspects. Often an expansion is seen in specific tonotopically organized cortex, although reductions can also be elicited under some circumstances (Shetake et al., 2012). Second, such changes are typically quite task-specific even within the same cortical region (Ohl and Scheich, 2005; Polley et al., 2006). Third, crotamiton reorganization is strongest when the auditory input is behaviorally relevant and if a task is actively trained (e.g., Fritz et al., 2005; Ohl and Scheich, 2005; Recanzone et al., 1993). Fourth, cortical remapping and adaptation of neural tuning are critically dependent on the reward value of the learned stimulus (Blake et al., 2006; David et al., 2012), which in turn is likely related to neuromodulatory influences arising from midbrain and forebrain nuclei (Bakin and Weinberger, 1996; Bao et al., 2001). Fifth, these changes are influenced by the maturational state of the nervous system, being generally greater during certain early periods of development (de Villers-Sidani et al., 2007, 2008). Finally, there are also short-term changes in neural response properties that reflect contingencies of a given task, and that are also quickly reversible (Fritz et al., 2005).