Auditory brainstem evoked responses and attention. Contribution to a controversial subject

The clinical usefulness of the brainstem evoked response (BAER) derives from the high inter- and intra-subject reproducibility of V-wave latency. Attentiveness represents one possible cause of variation. To evaluate the effect of auditory or visual attention tasks and their repetition, we recorded BAERs during six repetitions of each of these two tasks. Each BAER was evoked by 2 000, 40 dB Hearing Level clicks. The results show that, at the 0.05 level, the difference in V-wave latency for auditory and for visual tasks is not significant. Moreover, repetition of the attention tasks fails to bring about any significant (p less than 0.05) change in this difference. In agreement with some researchers, but not with others, we show that attentiveness has little effect on BAER V-wave latency.