TY - JOUR T1 - Superior Visual Timing Sensitivity in Auditory but not Visual World Class Drum Corps Experts JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0241-18.2018 SP - ENEURO.0241-18.2018 AU - Nestor Matthews AU - Leslie Welch AU - Elena Festa Y1 - 2018/11/21 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/early/2018/11/21/ENEURO.0241-18.2018.abstract N2 - World class drum corps require cooperation among performance artists to render precisely synchronized and asynchronized events. For example, drum corps visual aesthetics often feature salient radial and rotational motion displays from color guard. Accordingly, extensive color guard training might predict superior visual timing sensitivity to asynchronies in radial and rotational motion displays. Less intuitively, one might instead predict superior visual timing sensitivity among world class drum corps musicians, who regularly sub-divide musical tempos into brief time units. This prediction arises from the possibility that auditory training transfers cross-modally. Here, we investigated whether precise visual temporal order judgments more strongly align with color guard’s visual training or musicians’ auditory training. To mimic color guard visual displays, stimuli comprised bilateral plaid patterns that radiated or rotated before changing direction asynchronously. Human participants indicated whether the direction changed first on the left or right –a temporal order judgment (TOJ). Twenty-five percussionists, 67 brass players, and 29 color guard from a world class drum corps collectively completed 67,760 visual TOJ trials. Percussionists exhibited significantly lower TOJ thresholds than did brass players, who exhibited significantly lower TOJ thresholds than did color guard. Group median thresholds spanned an order of magnitude, ranging between 29 milliseconds (percussionists judging rotational asynchronies) and 290 milliseconds (color guard judging radial asynchronies). The results suggest that visual timing can improve more by training cross-modally than intra-modally, even when intra-modal training and testing stimuli closely match. More broadly, pre-existing training histories can provide a unique window into the nervous system’s timing sensitivity.Significance Statement Optimal cognitive and behavioral performance typically occurs when training conditions closely match testing conditions. This fundamental principle from learning and memory predicts greater visual test performance after visual training than after auditory training. Contrastingly, a fundamental sensory principle –superior temporal precision for auditory versus visual stimuli – predicts better visual test performance after auditory training than after visual training. We observed more precise visual timing among musical experts than among visual experts who had years of visual experience that closely matched the testing stimuli. The musicians’ superior performance suggests that shared neural events mediate the precision of auditory and visual timing. Moreover, these shared neural events provide greater temporal precision than does matching sensory modalities across training and testing contexts. ER -