Grant: Joint Canada-Israel Health Research Program

This project seeks to understand the brain mechanisms necessary for people to learn to perceive sounds. We will test people with and without musical training to evaluate their capacity to learn sound patterns, and we will scan them with magnetic resonance imaging to determine the neural circuits that underlie these abilities. Musicians from Israel and India will be compared to determine how different cultural factors affect learning. These findings will help us to understand the mechanisms of learning which can then be applied to predict learning problems. We will also test persons with dyslexia to understand how this disorder may be related to impairments in the ability to learn new sound patterns.