Early Musical Predictions in the Brain as Indexed by the Mismatch Negativity-From Acoustic Deviants to Cognitive...

Since the early 1990s, mismatch negativity (MMN) has been widely used to investigate sensory memory traces and predictive processing of musically relevant acoustic features, including timber, relational pitch, and rhythm. Evidence consistently demonstrates that the human brain possesses innate musical abilities, which can be further refined through training. The interplay between innate predispositions and experience is supported by robust associations between MMN parameters and behavioral measures of listening ability in both musically trained and untrained children and adults, with these associations further modulated by the duration of musical training. These findings align with hierarchical predictive-processing accounts of MMN, according to which mismatch responses can index prediction error signals whose amplitude is modulated by the precision of internal auditory models: MMN amplitudes decrease with increasing contextual complexity and show more frontal scalp distributions in musicians. As stimulation paradigms have become increasingly ecologically valid, distinguishing low-level sensory prediction errors indexed by MMN from higher level frontal prediction errors has grown more challenging, supporting an integrative perspective in which generative models dynamically merge bottom-up sensory input with top-down priors across hierarchical levels of the central nervous system. In this review, we summarize evidence for a "musical intelligence" of the MMN mechanism, highlighting its role within hierarchical auditory predictive processing.