Abstract
Detecting regularity and change in the environment is crucial for survival, as it enables making predictions about the world and informing goal-directed behavior. In the auditory modality, the detection of regularity involves segregating incoming sounds into distinct perceptual objects (stream segregation). The detection of change from this within-stream regularity is associated with the mismatch negativity, a component of auditory event-related brain potentials (ERPs). A central unanswered question is how the detection of regularity and the detection of change are interrelated, and whether attention affects the former, the latter, or both. Here we show that the detection of regularity and the detection of change can be empirically dissociated, and that attention modulates the detection of change without precluding the detection of regularity, and the perceptual organization of the auditory background into distinct streams. By applying frequency spectra analysis on the EEG of subjects engaged in a selective listening task, we found distinct peaks of ERP synchronization, corresponding to the rhythm of the frequency streams, independently of whether the stream was attended or ignored. Our results provide direct neurophysiological evidence of regularity detection in the auditory background, and show that it can occur independently of change detection and in the absence of attention.
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Notes
ABS refers to computing absolute values, FFT to computing a fast Fourier transform, and MEAN to the average of the ERPs.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the “Art & Neuroscience” fellowship from the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America (A.P.), by the “Columbia Science” fellowship from Columbia University (A.P.), by the National Institutes of Health Grant # R01 DC004263 (E.S.), and by the German Research Foundation Grant SFB/TRR 31 (C.S.H.). A.P. is currently supported by a Marie Curie Actions - BRIDGE Fellowship from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme, at the University of Geneva.
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This is one of several papers published together in Brain Topography on the ‘‘Special Issue: Auditory Cortex 2012”.
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10548_2014_368_MOESM1_ESM.jpg
Supplementary Figure. Event-related potentials and difference waveforms in the middle stream. Top: ERPs recorded from the central-frontal (Fz) electrode when subjects heard standard (blue lines) and deviant (red lines) tones within the middle frequency range in the 3-stream condition. Bottom: difference waveforms obtained by subtracting the ERP responses recorded when subjects heard standard tones from those recorded when subjects heard deviant tones. The deflection is not statistically significant (see Table 1) (JPEG 29 kb).
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Pannese, A., Herrmann, C.S. & Sussman, E. Analyzing the Auditory Scene: Neurophysiologic Evidence of a Dissociation Between Detection of Regularity and Detection of Change. Brain Topogr 28, 411–422 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-014-0368-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-014-0368-4