Dynamic reconfiguration of functional subgraphs after musical training in young adults

Abstract The human brain works in a form of network architecture in which dynamic modules and subgraphs were considered to enable efficient information communication supporting diverse brain functions from fixed anatomy. Previous study demonstrated musical training induced flexible node assignment changes of visual and auditory systems. However, how the dynamic subgraphs change with musical training still remains largely unknown. Here, 29 novices healthy young adults who received 24-week piano training, and another 27 novices without any intervention were scanned at three time points—before and after musical training, and 12 weeks after training. We used nonnegative matrix factorization to identify a set of subgraphs and their corresponding time-dependent coefficients from a concatenated functional network of all subjects in sliding time windows. The energy and entropy of the time-dependent coefficients were computed to quantify the subgraph’s dynamic changes in expression. The musical training group showed significantly increased energy of time-dependent coefficients of 3 subgraphs after training. Furthermore, one of the subgraphs, comprised of primary functional systems and cingulo-opercular task control and salience systems, showed significantly changed entropy in the training group after training. Our results suggest that interaction of functional systems undergoes significant changes in their fine-scale dynamic after a period of musical training. Author Summary We designed a longitudinal experiment to investigate the musical training induced dynamic subgraph changes in 29 novice healthy young adults before and after musical training compared with another 27 novice participants who were evaluated longitudinal but without any intervention. The nonnegative matrix factorization was employed to decompose the constructed dynamic functional connectivity matrix to a set of subgraphs and their corresponding time-dependent coefficients. We found that functional systems interacted closely with each other during transient process, and the musical training group showed significantly increased energy and entropy of time-dependent coefficients after training when compared with the control group. The present study suggests that musical training could induce the reconfiguration of functional subgraphs in young adults.