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Sequential effects on the ERP in discriminating two stimuli.

M Sams, K Alho, R Näätänen

Biological Psychology

|August 1, 1983

Summary

Brain responses reveal how the brain detects unexpected auditory stimuli. The mismatch negativity and N2b components suggest the brain actively predicts and detects deviations from a voluntary mental template.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Auditory Perception
Cognitive Neuroscience

Background:

The oddball paradigm is used to study automatic change detection in the brain.
Mismatch negativity (MMN) is an event-related potential (ERP) component associated with detecting auditory deviance.
Previous research suggests MMN reflects a neuronal mismatch process against an existing neuronal model.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in response to auditory stimuli when subjects voluntarily attend to one stimulus.
To examine how stimulus sequence and voluntary attention influence ERPs, particularly mismatch negativity (MMN) and N2b.
To explore the role of N2b in reflecting template mismatch during voluntary attention.

Main Methods:

Presentation of two auditory stimuli with differing pitches in a randomized order.
Subjects were instructed to count one specific stimulus (target) while ignoring the other (distractor).
Averaging of ERPs based on the preceding stimulus sequence to analyze neural responses to attended and unattended stimuli.

Main Results:

ERPs to the distractor stimulus, following repetitions of the target stimulus, exhibited features similar to the MMN observed in the oddball paradigm.
MMN was observed, suggesting a neuronal mismatch process against a voluntarily held mental model of the target stimulus.
A later negativity, termed N2b, occurred specifically when the distractor stimulus followed one or more target stimuli, but not vice versa.

Conclusions:

The findings indicate that the brain generates MMN-like responses even when attention is voluntarily directed towards a specific stimulus.
The N2b component appears to reflect a template mismatch process, where a stimulus deviates from the subject's voluntarily maintained mental representation of the target.
This suggests a dynamic interplay between automatic change detection mechanisms and voluntary attentional control in auditory processing.

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