Fig. 6: Musical ability is not related to sound encoding as measured with the scalp-recorded FFR.
Musical ability is unrelated to sound neural encoding for /da/ in babble (a–c) or /mi3/ in quiet (d). Musical ability was assessed using an objective measure of melody discrimination41 and quantified using a non-parametric estimate of sensitivity, d′p62,63, where higher d′p indicates better performance (a: r = −0.055, p = 0.824, CI [−0.15, 1]; b: r = −0.031, p = 0.701, CI [−0.127, 1]; c: r = −0.074, p = 0.897, CI [−0.196, 1]; d: r = 0.057, p = 0.177, CI [−0.044, 1]). All tests were one-tailed and Bonferroni-corrected for four comparisons (α = 0.0125). Note that the y-axis in (c) is the adjusted stimulus-to-response correlation. In (c, d), analyses were conducted on the z-transformed stimulus-to-response correlations. White circles: Non-musicians; Dark blue circles: Musicians; Light blue circles: Participants in neither of the strictly defined groups; Arrow points to outliers.
