Electrophysiological correlates of auditory change detection and change deafness in complex auditory scenes

Change deafness describes the failure to perceive even intense changes within complex auditory input, if the listener does not attend to the changing sound. Remarkably, previous psychophysical data provide evidence that this effect occurs independently of successful stimulus encoding, indicating that undetected changes are processed to some extent in auditory cortex. Here we investigated cortical representations of detected and undetected auditory changes using electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings and a change deafness paradigm. We applied a one-shot change detection task, in which participants listened successively to three complex auditory scenes, each of them consisting of six simultaneously presented auditory streams. Listeners had to decide whether all scenes were identical or whether the pitch of one stream was changed between the last two presentations. Our data show significantly increased middle-latency Nb responses for both detected and undetected changes as compared to no-change trials. In contrast, only successfully detected changes were associated with a later mismatch response in auditory cortex, followed by increased N2, P3a and P3b responses, originating from hierarchically higher non-sensory brain regions. These results strengthen the view that undetected changes are successfully encoded at sensory level in auditory cortex, but fail to trigger later change-related cortical responses that lead to conscious perception of change.