Authors: Michael J Spilka Christopher J Steele Virginia B Penhune
Publish Date: 2010/06/24
Volume: 204, Issue: 4, Pages: 549-558
Abstract
Imitation plays a crucial role in the learning of many complex motor skills Recent behavioral and neuroimaging evidence suggests that the ability to imitate is influenced by past experience such as musical training To investigate the impact of musical training on motor imitation musicians and nonmusicians were tested on their ability to imitate videoclips of simple and complex twohanded gestures taken from American Sign Language Participants viewed a set of 30 gestures one at a time and imitated them immediately after presentation Participants’ imitations were videotaped and scored offline by raters blind to participant group Imitation performance was assessed by a rating of performance accuracy where the arm hand and finger components of the gestures were rated separately on a 5point scale 1 = unrecognizable 5 = exact imitation A global accuracy score PAglobal was calculated by summing the three components Response duration compared to the model MTdiff and reaction time RT were also assessed Results indicated that musicians were able to imitate more accurately than nonmusicians reflected by significantly higher PAglobal and lower MTdiff scores Furthermore the greatest difference in performance was for the finemotor finger gesture component These findings support the view that the ability to imitate is influenced by experience This is consistent with generalist theories of motor imitation which explain imitation in terms of links between perceptual and motor action representations that become strengthened through experience It is also likely that musical training contributed to the ability to imitate manual gestures by influencing the personal action repertoire of musiciansThe authors wish to thank Robert Carver for his sign language expertise and all those who participated in this study We also thank Magali Keil Amanda Daly Annie Dubé and Olga Ganova for their assistance with data collection and scoring This research was supported by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada NSERC238670 and the Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec VP and the NSERC CREATE Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience Training Grant MS
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