ReviewThe mismatch-negativity (MMN) component of the auditory event-related potential to violations of abstract regularities: A review
Section snippets
Introduction: the “abstract-feature” mismatch-negativity (MMN) studies
A long-standing problem in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience has been the extent to which the human brain processes information automatically, without conscious efforts and outside our attentional focus and/or consciousness. This problem has manifested itself in various forms in several research paradigms, such as the processing of subliminal stimuli, information processing during sleep, the processing of unattended-channel information in selective attention conditions, various
Extraction of abstract invariances within a single stimulus feature
The afore-discussed Saarinen et al. (1992) study started a new line of MMN research, exploring the processing of abstract features in the brain. However, before examining the literature further, a simpler explanation for their results must be considered: perhaps the MMN obtained was just based on storing a separate memory trace for each of the physically different standard pairs, with the infrequent deviant pairs mismatching with these traces. If this were the case, no higher-order invariance
Relationship to attention
The dependency of (physical-feature) MMN on attention has been a subject of a long controversy. Originally, Näätänen et al. (1978; see also Näätänen, 1990, Näätänen, 1992 proposed that the generation of MMN is fully automatic (independent of attention), reflecting a pre-attentive deviance-detection process which occurs irrespective of whether or not the subject attends to the auditory stimuli. There is evidence for this view from different paradigms. The MMN is typically elicited in ignore
Long-term and expertise effects
Originally, it was supposed that the physical stimulus features stored in the memory traces reflected by MMN irreversibly decay within ca. 10 s after the cessation of the stimulation (e.g., Sams et al., 1993). However, it has become apparent that the information stored in the traces may enter more durable forms of memory. For example, Cowan et al. (1993) demonstrated that the trace of the physical features of the standard stimulus that had decayed to the extent that the deviant stimulus no
Effects on the primary-task performance
With concrete rules, it has been shown that rule violations elicit not only MMN but usually also the P3a component, reflecting brief, involuntary attention switching to the deviant event (Escera and Corral, 2007). The automatic attention switch to deviant events is biologically meaningful, as sudden changes in the environment can carry potentially important information for the organism. Moreover, the attention switch causes a momentary decrease in the processing resources allocated to the
Relationship to conscious deviance detection and awareness of the regularities
The abstract-feature MMN studies might shed some light even on the debate concerning the possible attention-effects on MMN (see Section 3) by clarifying a related question, namely, the dependence of MMN on the conscious identification of the deviant events: Is MMN elicited by deviants even when the subject cannot consciously detect them and/or when he/she is unaware of, and unable to express, the regularities differentiating the standard and deviant events? Such a finding would provide strong
Locus of origin in the brain
The MMN to physical deviance gets a contribution from two main brain areas: a bilateral supratemporal process at the auditory cortices and a predominantly right-hemispheric frontal process (for reviews, see Alho, 1995, Deouell, 2007, Näätänen et al., 2007). The supratemporal MMN component is, presumably, associated with the pre-perceptual detection of regularity violation, whereas the frontal component appears to be related to the involuntary attention switch caused by the violation (Näätänen
A model of the neural, behavioral and conscious events associated with the processing of auditory regularities
On the basis of the afore-reviewed studies, the following model (Fig. 4) is proposed: The auditory cortex is continuously extracting various regularities embedded in the auditory stimulation and storing representations of them. The formation of these preattentive representations is usually fairly rapid and dynamic, adapting fast to changes in the environment. This process generally seems to occur automatically, even without focusing attention on auditory stimuli. However, with certain types of
Some challenges for the future research and conclusions
Some questions that obviously need to be addressed in future studies involve, for example, the extent of this type of regularity extraction: how diverse and complex auditory regularities can be extracted on the processing level reflected by the MMN? In what type of condition does this extraction occur automatically and when is selective attention to auditory stimuli needed? The exact relationship between the abstract-MMN mechanisms, behavioral changes and conscious awareness of the regularities
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Professor Risto Näätänen, Professor Mari Tervaniemi and the two anonymous reviewers for their useful and constructive comments on the manuscript.
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