Predictable changes within fast-paced sound sequences do not elicit the mismatch negativity: A conceptual in-class...

In the past decade, there has been considerable concern about the reproducibility of psychological research. We suggest that in-class replications are a feasible setting for the replication of psychophysiological findings and present our conceptual in-class replication of a finding by Sussman, Ritter, and Vaughan Jr. (1998). In the original study, infrequent pitch deviants (proportion: 20%) were presented either at fixed (i.e., predictable) positions or at random positions (i.e., as classic oddballs) in the auditory sequence. The authors found that deviants presented in the predictable condition did not elicit the mismatch negativity (MMN) in the event-related potential (ERP) when the tone sequence was presented at sufficiently fast stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) but deviants presented in the random condition elicited an MMN. We replicated a subset of the original conditions in a sample of 25 participants. Although we had changed some aspects of the original design we found frequentist and Bayesian statistical evidence in favor of ERP-differences in the predictable vs. the random condition in the MMN time window. In line with the original results deviants presented in the predictable condition did not elicit an MMN suggesting that the auditory system extracts regularly occurring patterns within fast-paced task-irrelevant acoustic input. However, sequential Bayes factor analysis showed a substantial between-participant variability in the random condition obscuring the presence of a reliable MMN. We discuss potential inter-individual differences in segregating fast-paced sound sequences into separate streams as an explanation for this phenomenon. We further discuss advantages and disadvantages of in-class replications in psychophysiological research.