Spatiotemporal maturation of the central and lateral N1 components to tones

This paper examines maturational changes in the spatiotemporal features of central and lateral N1 components of the auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) to tone stimuli presented with a long stimulus onset asyncrony (SOA; 4200 ms) using the scalp current density (SCD) technique. A group of typically developing children ranging from 6 to 12 years of age and a group of adults were studied. Recently studies have begun to explore the topography of these components in children. These studies, however, often used rapidly presented stimuli and did not elicit observable central N1s in the younger children. Our stimuli elicited both central and lateral N1s. Peak latencies of both components decreased with age. Peak amplitude also decreased with age for the lateral N1 but not for the central N1. Consequently, the difference between the lateral N1 and the central N1 amplitudes (or the ratio of lateral N1 amplitude to central N1 amplitude) also decreased with age, dramatically altering the morphology of the elicited AEP waveforms. Topography of the lateral N1 did not change with age. The location of maximal activation for the central N1 appeared to move more medially with age but this 'apparent' movement is probably due to the decreasing impact of the partially overlapping lateral N1 component whose amplitude is significantly smaller in adults than in children.