Elsevier

Clinical Neurophysiology

Volume 118, Issue 12, December 2007, Pages 2544-2590
Clinical Neurophysiology

Invited review
The mismatch negativity (MMN) in basic research of central auditory processing: A review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinph.2007.04.026Get rights and content

Abstract

In the present article, the basic research using the mismatch negativity (MMN) and analogous results obtained by using the magnetoencephalography (MEG) and other brain-imaging technologies is reviewed. This response is elicited by any discriminable change in auditory stimulation but recent studies extended the notion of the MMN even to higher-order cognitive processes such as those involving grammar and semantic meaning. Moreover, MMN data also show the presence of automatic intelligent processes such as stimulus anticipation at the level of auditory cortex. In addition, the MMN enables one to establish the brain processes underlying the initiation of attention switch to, conscious perception of, sound change in an unattended stimulus stream.

Section snippets

The mismatch negativity (MMN): an introduction

In the present article, we will review the recent literature on the auditory mismatch negativity (MMN; Näätänen et al., 1978, Näätänen, 1979, Näätänen and Michie, 1979), a change-specific component of the auditory event-related brain potential (ERP). We will focus on MMN studies of basic cognitive brain research.

Recently, MMN studies of the central auditory function have become very popular. This is because the MMN has opened an unprecedented window to the central auditory processing and the

Memory dependence of MMN elicitation

The MMN depends on the presence of a short-term memory trace in the auditory cortex representing the repetitive aspects of the preceding auditory events, which usually lasts for a few seconds. Therefore, single sounds, even deviants, with no preceding sounds during the last few seconds elicit no MMN but rather enhanced obligatory responses P1, N1, and P2 (Näätänen and Picton, 1987, Korzyukov et al., 1999). Hence, the MMN seen in the difference wave delineated by subtracting the

Deviant-stimulus probability

The MMN amplitude is decreased by increasing the deviant-stimulus probability (Näätänen et al., 1987a, Ritter et al., 1992, Sabri and Campbell, 2001, Haenschel et al., 2005, Sato et al., 2000, Sato et al., 2002). This is partially due to the standard-stimulus being more often replaced by deviant stimuli (and cannot then contribute to trace strength) than they are with smaller deviant-stimulus probabilities. A more important factor, however, appears to be the fact that with shorter

Feature integration

Consequently, the traces involved in MMN elicitation seem to reflect feature-integrated sensory information underlying unitary auditory percepts (for a review, see Näätänen and Winkler, 1999). This was also shown by Gomes et al. (1997) who obtained an MMN by infrequently presenting a stimulus produced by conjugating features from two separate frequent stimuli. Subjects were presented with series of 4 different tones. Three of the tones (standards) were each delivered at a 30% probability, each

Automaticity of MMN elicitation

As already mentioned, the MMN generation is an automatic brain process in the sense that its occurrence does not depend on attention (Näätänen et al., 1978, Näätänen and Michie, 1979, Alho et al., 1989, Alho et al., 1994a, Alain et al., 1994; see also Muller-Gass et al., 2005). Hence, the MMN is elicited even when attention is strongly focused on a concurrent auditory stimulus stream. Under such conditions, the MMN amplitude may be somewhat attenuated, however (see Woldorff et al., 1991,

Involuntary attention switch to auditory change (passive attention)

It is assumed that the activation of an auditory change-detection mechanism reflected by the MMN may also trigger the switching of attention to potentially important events in the unattended auditory environment (Näätänen et al., 1978, Näätänen and Michie, 1979, Giard et al., 1990). This suggestion is supported by numerous studies (Schröger, 1996a, Schröger, 1996b, Alho et al., 1997, Escera et al., 1998, Escera et al., 2000a, Escera et al., 2001, Escera et al., 2003, Schröger and Wolff, 1998a,

MMN as a function of the magnitude of stimulus change

In general, the MMN amplitude gets larger and peak latency shorter with the increasing magnitude of stimulus deviation. For the frequency change of a sinusoidal tone, this was shown by several studies [e.g., Sams et al., 1985a, Lang et al., 1990, Tiitinen et al., 1994, Berti et al., 2004, Näätänen et al., 1997, Yago et al., 2001a, Yago et al., 2001b, Novitski et al., 2004, Novitski et al., 2007; for an MMN-amplitude increase with increased spectral complexity of stimuli, see Tervaniemi et al.,

MMN as an index of discrimination accuracy

In the foregoing, it was suggested that the MMN represents a pre-attentive feature-specific code of stimulus change and, further, that it might provide an objective index of the discrimination accuracy for the different acoustic feature dimensions. This is supported by the fact that, in general, the MMN sensitivity to small stimulus changes seems quite well to correspond to the behavioural discrimination thresholds, which holds both with normal subjects and clinical populations. Some of these

The MMN as an index of memory traces for phonemes

As already mentioned, the MMN (MMNm) is also elicited when speech sounds are presented in a passive oddball paradigm (Aaltonen et al., 1987, Aaltonen et al., 1993, Aaltonen et al., 1994, Alho et al., 1998a, Bradlow et al., 1999, Cheour et al., 1998, Dehaene-Lambertz and Baillet, 1998, Diesch and Luce, 1997, Dehaene-Lambertz, 2000, Friederici et al., 2002, Ikeda et al., 2002, Jacobsen et al., 2004a, Jacobsen et al., 2004b, Honbolygó et al., 2004, Kayser et al., 1998, Kushnerenko et al., 2001,

The MMN as an index of mother-tongue syllable and word traces

Very importantly, with the MMN, one can also probe the memory representations of higher-order linguistic phenomena. MMN evidence for memory traces of mother-tongue syllables was reported by Shtyrov et al., 1998, Shtyrov et al., 2000 and Alho et al. (1998a), while similar evidence for morphemes was obtained by Shtyrov and Pulvermüller, 2002a, Shtyrov and Pulvermüller, 2002b and Shtyrov et al. (2005). Furthermore, Korpilahti et al. (2001), Pulvermüller et al. (2001a), and Shtyrov and

The MMN and musical stimuli

Studies using the MMN have also significantly contributed to our understanding of music perception and enjoyment. In their recent review, Tervaniemi and Brattico (2004) concluded that by using the MMN, we can look into the separate submodules of music perception “examining with optimal time resolution the dynamic stages of information processing, as well as their automaticity and possible top-down modulation (which may be determined, for example, by implicit or explicit knowledge of musical

Abstract-feature MMNs

As already reviewed, the pre-attentive auditory analysis reflected by the MMN is not restricted only to physical, or “first-order”, stimulus features but rather includes even more complex invariances, ones based on the relationships between various physical stimulus features, either within individual stimuli or between successive stimuli (e.g., Paavilainen et al., 1999). In these so-called “abstract-feature” MMN studies, there is no physically identical, repetitive standard stimulus but rather

Concluding discussion

In the present article, we have reviewed the main areas of the basic research of cognitive brain function using the MMN since the late 1970s when the MMN was described and interpreted. In the next, we will list the principal trends of this research during this period of almost 30 years.

  • (1)

    From simple to complex stimuli. The early studies (e.g., Näätänen et al., 1978) used simple stimuli such as single sinusoidal tones only. More recently, complex stimuli were also used such as complex tones (e.g.,

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Dr. Friedeman Pulvermüller, Dr. Thomas Jacobsen, and Dr. Rika Takegata for their valuable comments and additions to a the previous version of the present manuscript and Ms. Piiu Lehmus for her competent and patient text-editing work.

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