, 1998) and brainstem responses to tones (Wong et al., 2007). These modulatory effects of maturational state on experience-dependent Trametinib price changes likely emerge from an interaction of bottom-up and top-down mechanisms (Kral and Eggermont, 2007), which could include for instance finer tuning at sensory processing levels combined with stronger influences from attentional and other cognitive mechanisms (Penhune, 2011). The questions of developmental

phases also pertain to the topics of interindividual differences and metaplasticity that are still open for investigation, for example, how musical training during childhood interacts with the array of developmental changes that are underway, how the initial status of the brain during childhood and musical training in different phases of life influence the potential for learning later on, and if the time windows for metaplastic effects are constrained

by development and maturation. For example, metaplastic effects might differ depending on when the long-term training occurred. Despite the fact that earlier training has more profound effects on brain plasticity, training changes brain structure and function at all ages, even in old age. For instance results from visuomotor juggling training in elderly adults show that http://www.selleckchem.com/products/chir-99021-ct99021-hcl.html anatomical changes can be observed even later in life (Boyke et al., 2008), although they are not as extensive. Cortical plasticity from unimodal motor training is however diminished in the elderly (Rogasch et al., 2009). This seems to suggest that exploiting the effects of multimodality and reward that not music might offer for plasticity might be especially beneficial in elderly adults. Since plasticity in the healthy and diseased aging brain is of particularly high relevance in aging societies, future research should explore the potential of musical training in these populations. While the focus of most larger studies is on general measures of physical and cognitive lifestyle, there are also some

indications that specifically musical training might mitigate some effects of aging in the brain (Wan and Schlaug, 2010). The evidence is good at the perceptual level that musical experience seems to delay the onset of age-related losses of neural encoding in the brainstem during speech perception (Parbery-Clark et al., 2012) and regarding auditory working memory capacity and the ability to understand speech in noisy environments (Parbery-Clark et al., 2011; Figure 5). Long-term musical practice may also reduce age-related declines in higher-order cognition such as nonverbal memory, naming, and executive processes (Hanna-Pladdy and MacKay, 2011), although confounding factors such as socioeconomic background or intelligence cannot be entirely excluded in such cross-sectional studies. An intervention study using physical exercise accompanied by music showed significant improvements in cognition in dementia patients compared to a control group (Van de Winckel et al., 2004).