Cognitive function predicts neural activity associated with pre-attentive temporal processing

Temporal processing, or processing time-related information, appears to play a significant role in a variety of vital psychological functions. One of the main confounds to assessing the neural underpinnings and cognitive correlates of temporal processing is that behavioral measures of timing are generally confounded by other supporting cognitive processes, such as attention. Further, much theorizing in this field has relied on findings from clinical populations (e.g., individuals with schizophrenia) known to have temporal processing deficits. In this study, we attempted to avoid these difficulties by comparing temporal processing assessed by a pre-attentive event-related brain potential (ERP) waveform, the mismatch negativity (MMN) elicited by time-based stimulus features, to a number of cognitive functions within a non-clinical sample. We studied healthy older adults (without dementia), as this population inherently ensures more prominent variability in cognitive function than a younger adult sample, allowing for the detection of significant relationships between variables. Using hierarchical regression analyses, we found that verbal memory and executive functions (i.e., planning and conditional inhibition, but not set-shifting) uniquely predicted variance in temporal processing beyond that predicted by the demographic variables of age, gender, and hearing loss. These findings are consistent with a frontotemporal model of MMN waveform generation in response to changes in the temporal features of auditory stimuli.