Attention to affective audio-visual information: comparing individuals with varying musical experience

Individuals with more musical training repeatedly demonstrate enhanced auditory perception abilities. The current study examined how these enhanced auditory skills interact with attention to affective audio-visual stimuli. A total of 16 participants with more than 5 years of musical training (musician group) and 16 participants with less than 2 years of musical training (non-musician group) took part in a version of the audio-visual emotional Stroop test, using happy, neutral, and sad emotions. Participants were presented with congruent and incongruent combinations of face and voice stimuli while judging the emotion of either the face or the voice. As predicted, musicians were less susceptible to interference from visual information on auditory emotion judgments than non-musicians, as evidenced by musicians being more accurate when judging auditory emotions when presented with congruent and incongruent visual information. Musicians were also more accurate than non-musicians at identifying visual emotions when presented with concurrent auditory information. Thus, musicians were less influenced by congruent/incongruent information in a non-target modality compared to non-musicians. The results suggest that musical training influences audio-visual information processing