Humans must learn a variety of sensorimotor skills, yet the relative contributions of sensory and motor information to skill acquisition remain unclear. Here we compare the behavioral and neural contributions of perceptual learning to that of motor learning, and we test whether these contributions depend on the expertise of the learner. Pianists and nonmusicians learned to perform novel melodies on a piano during fMRI scanning in four learning conditions: listening (auditory learning), performing without auditory feedback (motor learning), performing with auditory feedback (auditory–motor learning), or observing visual cues without performing or listening (cue-only learning). Visual cues were present in every learning condition and consisted of musical notation for pianists and spatial cues for nonmusicians. Melodies were performed from memory with no visual cues and with auditory feedback (recall) five times during learning. Pianists showed greater improvements in pitch and rhythm accuracy at recall during auditory learning compared with motor learning. Nonmusicians demonstrated greater rhythm improvements at recall during auditory learning compared with all other learning conditions. Pianists showed greater primary motor response at recall during auditory learning compared with motor learning, and response in this region during auditory learning correlated with pitch accuracy at recall and with auditory–premotor network response during auditory learning. Nonmusicians showed greater inferior parietal response during auditory compared with auditory–motor learning, and response in this region correlated with pitch accuracy at recall. Results suggest an advantage for perceptual learning compared with motor learning that is both general and expertise-dependent. This advantage is hypothesized to depend on feedforward motor control systems that can be used during learning to transform sensory information into motor production.

Music performance requires control of two sequential structures: the ordering of pitches and the temporal intervals between successive pitches. Whether pitch and temporal structures are processed as separate or integrated features remains unclear. A repetition suppression paradigm compared neural and behavioral correlates of mapping pitch sequences and temporal sequences to motor movements in music performance. Fourteen pianists listened to and performed novel melodies on an MR-compatible piano keyboard during fMRI scanning. The pitch or temporal patterns in the melodies either changed or repeated (remained the same) across consecutive trials. We expected decreased neural response to the patterns (pitch or temporal) that repeated across trials relative to patterns that changed. Pitch and temporal accuracy were high, and pitch accuracy improved when either pitch or temporal sequences repeated over trials. Repetition of either pitch or temporal sequences was associated with linear BOLD decrease in frontal–parietal brain regions including dorsal and ventral premotor cortex, pre-SMA, and superior parietal cortex. Pitch sequence repetition (in contrast to temporal sequence repetition) was associated with linear BOLD decrease in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) while pianists listened to melodies they were about to perform. Decreased BOLD response in IPS also predicted increase in pitch accuracy only when pitch sequences repeated. Thus, behavioral performance and neural response in sensorimotor mapping networks were sensitive to both pitch and temporal structure, suggesting that pitch and temporal structure are largely integrated in auditory–motor transformations. IPS may be involved in transforming pitch sequences into spatial coordinates for accurate piano performance.