MICROSTATE SEGMENTATION OF NON-MUSICIAN BRAIN IN SIMULTANEOUSLY AUDIO-VISUAL PERCEPTION

Associations between picture and music sound form the basis of reading. Learning the correspondences between them is a crucial step in sight reading acquisition. This study was designed to investigate whether task-related processing of audio and visual features was independent or task-related processing in one modality might influence the processing of the other. The present study employed simultaneous audio-visual stimulus in the oddball paradigm to re-examine the effects of attention on audio, visual and audio-visual perception in the non-musician brain. Electroencephalographic (EEG) was recorded from 28 normal participants. Participants were presented with pitch (auditory: A), picture (visual: V), and simultaneous pitch and picture (audio-visual: AV). The result showed that the Korean participants showed larger mean interaction amplitude and longer in time than the Chinese participants. This reveals that experience influences the early cortical automatic processing of pitch contour. These results suggest that efficient processing of associations between pictures and sounds relies on neural mechanisms similar to those naturally evolved for integrating audiovisual perception.