The influence of attention on the auditory brain stem evoked responses. Preliminary report

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of attention on the auditory brainstem evoked responses (ABER). This was performed by measuring and statistically evaluating the interpeak latency times of wave I to wave V in 100 test subjects. The subjects were tested in three conditions: 1) selective attention to auditory click stimulation, 2) distraction by auditory stimuli, and 3) reinforced distraction by reading a newspaper during the click stimulations. It was observed that selective attention to the auditory stimulation leads to a decrease in the interpeak latency time (I-V) of, on the average, 0.2 milliseconds (statistically significant, 1%) in comparison with conditions 2 and 3.