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Updated: Aug 14, 2026
P50 Sensory Gating in Infants
Published on: December 26, 2013
Timing in the baby brain
Elizabeth M Brannon1, Lauren Wolfe Roussel, Warren H Meck
1Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Box 90999, Durham, NC 27708-0999, USA. brannon@duke.edu
Insights
Ten-month-old infants and adults can detect timing changes in sounds. Both groups showed brain responses, including mismatch negativity (MMN), indicating auditory processing development in infants.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Psychology
- Auditory Neuroscience
Background:
- Auditory processing in infants is crucial for cognitive development.
- Understanding how infants detect temporal changes in auditory stimuli is key to early brain development research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the auditory processing capabilities of 10-month-old infants compared to adults.
- To examine brain responses to deviant inter-stimulus intervals (ISI) in an auditory oddball paradigm.
Main Methods:
- Utilized an auditory oddball paradigm with standard (1500 ms) and deviant (500 ms) tone intervals.
- Recorded event-related potentials (ERP) in 10-month-old infants and adults.
- Analyzed mismatch negativity (MMN) and deviance-related positivity in ERP difference waves.
Main Results:
- Both infants and adults exhibited significant mismatch negativity (MMN) to deviant ISI tones.
- Infants showed a robust, longer-latency deviance-related positivity (330-520 ms).
- Adults displayed a smaller, later deviance-related positivity (585-705 ms).
Conclusions:
- The 10-month-old infant brain demonstrates mechanisms for detecting temporal deviations in auditory stimuli, similar to adults.
- Early auditory processing, specifically timing-deviance detection, appears to be relatively mature by 10 months of age.
- These findings contribute to understanding the developmental trajectory of auditory perception and neural processing.
Abstract:
Ten-month-old infants and adults were tested in an auditory oddball paradigm in which 50-ms tones were separated by 1500 ms (standard interval) and occasionally 500 ms (deviant interval). Both infants and adults showed marked brain responses to the tone that followed a deviant inter-stimulus interval (ISI). Specifically, the timing-deviance event-related-potential (ERP) difference waves (deviant-ISI ERP minus standard-ISI ERP) yielded a significant, fronto-centrally distributed, mismatch negativity (MMN) in the latency range of 120-240 ms post-stimulus for infants and 110-210 ms for adults. A robust, longer latency, deviance-related positivity was also obtained for infants (330-520 ms), with a much smaller and later deviance-related positivity observed for adults (585-705 ms). These results suggest that the 10-month-old infant brain has already developed some of the same mechanisms as adults for detecting deviations in the timing of stimulus events.
