Mismatch Negativity

Neuropsychophysiological evidence is r e- viewed testing a three-stage, top down working model of the traditional hypnotic relaxation induction involv- ing: 1) a thalamocortical attentional network engaging a left frontolimbic focussed attention control system un- derpinning sensory fixation and concentration on the induction; 2) instatement of frontolimbic inhibitory sys- tems through suggestions of tiredness at fix ation and relaxation whereby anterior executive functions are sus- pended and directed by the induction; 3) engagement of right-sided temporoposterior functions through passive imagery and dreaming. A sel ectivity of a ction in high susceptibles was a hallmark of the studies. Increased Stroop interference coincided with maintenance of e r- ror detection and abolition of error evaluation poten- tials, interpreted as dissociation of cognitive and affec- tive executive systems of the anterior cingulate. Verbal, category and design fluency tasks were dissociated with hypnos...

ABSTRACT Individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HF-ASD) often show superior performance in simple visual tasks, despite difficulties in the perception of socially important information such as facial expression. The neural basis of visual perception abnormalities associated with HF-ASD is currently unclear. We sought to elucidate the functioning of bottom-up and top-down visual information processing in HF-ASD using event-related potentials (ERPs). Eleven adults with HF-ASD and 11 age-matched normal controls (NC) participated in this study. Visual ERPs were recorded using 128-channel EEG. The P1 and P300 were recorded in response to target stimuli. Visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) potentials were obtained by subtracting responses to standard from those to deviant stimuli. Behaviorally, individuals with HF-ASD showed faster target detection than NCs. However, vMMN amplitude and latency were the same between the two groups. In contrast, P1 and P300 amplitudes were significantly decreased in HF-ASD compared with NCs. In addition, P300 latency was significantly delayed in HF-ASD. Individuals with HF-ASD exhibit altered visual information processing. Intact bottom-up attention (vMMN) may contribute to their superior simple visual task performance in spite of abnormal low-level (P1) and top-down (P300) visual information processing.

Event-related potential (ERP) correlates of distraction are usually investigated in the oddball paradigm following a discrete, trial-by-trial stimulation protocol. In this design, participants perform a discrimination task while oddball stimuli deviate in a task-irrelevant stimulus feature. In our experiment, participants detected gaps in a continuous tone while infrequent frequency glides served as distracting events. Glides preceding a gap by 150ms delayed the response to the gap and elicited the ERP sequence of N1, probably MMN, P3a, and reorienting negativity, suggesting that these responses reflect distraction-related processes which are neither task- nor stimulation-specific. When participants watched a silent movie and the auditory stimulation was task-irrelevant, glides preceding a gap by 150ms enhanced the amplitude of the gap-elicited N1. However, when the auditory stimulation was task-relevant, the gap-elicited N1 was attenuated. These results show that the glides drew attention away from the ongoing task, both from watching the silent movie and from detecting gaps.

Intro This is a condensed part of a much larger argument that comes from my forthcoming book which attempts to provide a multi-level conception of noise that brings out its full significance without hypostatizing or fetishizing it I elaborate this within a broadly information-theoretic modal realist metaphysical frame allowing for a description of the processes and structures underlying both the continuities and discontinuities between physical, biological, and cognitive systems, and giving a functionalist computationalist theory of mind as a pragmatically elaborated hierarchically nested non-equilibrium thermodynamic system it is broadly information-theoretic in the sense in which information provides the unifying framework for the analysis of structures, processes and systems at diverse levels of organization modal realism just means that modalities such as actuality, possibility, and necessity, are not just attributions by the mind that can be eliminated by reduction to some foundationalist level of description (composed of individuals such as atoms) but that what really exists are modal relations that hold across and between those diverse levels of structures and processes importantly, even though the description of anything that IS can be fully achieved within this unifying information-theoretic framework (in terms of degrees of randomness or patterns of structural organization), such a description is not adequate even to those complex systems displaying historicity, such as living systems, let alone to the mind (or to the social systems in which mind is necessarily embedded) As Negarestani asserts, mind is a project for which a complete description is not possible even though mind is causally reducible to the physical and chemical processes that compose it, in constraining and coordinating behaviour according to pragmatic proprieties and normative attitudes, it is logically irreducible to its information theoretic description the title of my talk refers to the notion of Autopoiesis developed in second-order cybernetics, where systems are observing rather than merely observed – where reflexivity, recursion, and self-referentiality are intrinsic factors, and systems are analysed in terms of their structural coupling with the environment, with which they form a single circuit with a doubled feedback the maintenance of internal order is no longer due to the robustness of the system to noise but to its resilience to perturbations (this moves from Schrodinger's reproduction of internal consistency by order-from-order to Von Foerster's notion of order-from-noise) so autopoietic systems dynamically self-organise at a number of different scales of observation

Theories of predictive processing propose that prediction error responses are modulated by the certainty of the predictive model or precision. While there is some evidence for this phenomenon in the visual and, to a lesser extent, the auditory modality, little is known about whether it operates in the complex auditory contexts of daily life. Here, we examined how prediction error responses behave in a more complex and ecologically valid auditory context than those typically studied. We created musical tone sequences with different degrees of pitch uncertainty to manipulate the precision of participants’ auditory expectations. Magnetoencephalography was used to measure the magnetic counterpart of the mismatch negativity (MMNm) as a neural marker of prediction error in a multi-feature paradigm. Pitch, slide, intensity and timbre deviants were included. We compared high-entropy stimuli, consisting of a set of non-repetitive melodies, with low-entropy stimuli consisting of a simple, repetitive pitch pattern. Pitch entropy was quantitatively assessed with an information-theoretic model of auditory expectation. We found a reduction in pitch and slide MMNm amplitudes in the high-entropy as compared to the low-entropy context. No significant differences were found for intensity and timbre MMNm amplitudes. Furthermore, in a separate behavioral experiment investigating the detection of pitch deviants, similar decreases were found for accuracy measures in response to more fine-grained increases in pitch entropy. Our results are consistent with a precision modulation of auditory prediction error in a musical context, and suggest that this effect is specific to features that depend on the manipulated dimension—pitch information, in this case. Preprint versions available at: https://doi.org/10.1101/422949.

Reading is a fundamental skill for success in everyday life. Unfortunately, 5-20% of all children in the U.S. experience some form of reading difficulty (RD), such as dyslexia. Prosody—i.e., the suprasegmental features of phonology—helps to convey the meaning of speech beyond actual spoken words and has been implicated to facilitate language comprehension. Increasing evidence supports a link between prosodic sensitivity (PS) and reading skills and suggests PS may be predictive of reading outcomes. However, the role of PS in reading comprehension has not been well established. Likewise, research remains sparse on the interactions of the neurocognitive systems underlying the components of prosody and reading. Furthermore, the majority of studies that have examined prosodic sensitivity primarily focused on the rhythmic or metrical aspects, while intonation is not always accounted for.

As such, the current dissertation research addresses this specific gap in the literature by focusing specifically on the intonation aspect of prosody and how it relates to reading comprehension skills in adult readers, after controlling for phoneme perception and vocabulary. To this end, the mismatch negativity (MMN) was recorded using the audio-morphing paradigm developed by Sammler and colleagues (2015) to measure neural sensitivity to auditory cues of phonemic or prosodic contrasts. Participants were also administered standardized behavioral measures of vocabulary knowledge and silent reading comprehension skills.

Results showed that the intonation aspect of prosody statistically significantly relates to reading; however, the behavioral-EEG relationship was less clear, as there still are quite a few ways to examine the data before a behavioral-EEG relationship can be ruled out with any certainty. Findings of this study have potentially important implications for early identification and possible intervention for students at risk for RD. Most early reading interventions focus on the segmental aspects of phonology, while few programs specifically address this suprasegmental aspect. As such, these study findings fill this gap and contribute to a better understanding of what role these particular segmental and suprasegmental features of phonology play in reading and provide merit for subsequent EEG studies to further examine the relationship between the prosodic feature of intonation and reading.

Changes in the intensity of both vocal and nonvocal sounds can be emotionally relevant. However, as only vocal sounds directly reflect communicative intent, intensity change of vocal but not nonvocal sounds is socially relevant. Here we investigated whether a change in sound intensity is processed differently depending on its social relevance. To this end, participants listened passively to a sequence of vocal or nonvocal sounds that contained rare deviants which differed from standards in sound intensity. Concurrently recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed a mismatch negativity (MMN) and P300 effect for intensity change. Direction of intensity change was of little importance for vocal stimulus sequences, which recruited enhanced sensory and attentional resources for both loud and soft deviants. In contrast, intensity change in nonvocal sequences recruited more sensory and attentional resources for loud as compared to soft deviants. This was reflected in markedly larger MMN/P300 amplitudes and shorter P300 latencies for the loud as compared to soft nonvocal deviants. Furthermore, while the processing pattern observed for nonvocal sounds was largely comparable between men and women, sex differences for vocal sounds suggest that women were more sensitive to their social relevance. These findings extend previous evidence of sex differences in vocal processing and add to reports of voice specific processing mechanisms by demonstrating that simple acoustic change recruits more processing resources if it is socially relevant.

The mismatch negativity (MMN) response elicited to auditory stimuli is an indicator for cognitive function of sound discrimination in humans. MMN was successfully recorded in previous studies in newborns and fetuses (33-40 weeks of gestation) with magnetoencephalography (MEG). The aim of our study was to perform systematic serial MMN recordings on fetuses starting at 28 weeks of gestation with a follow up recording within 2 weeks after birth. The recording of weak magnetic fields from the fetal brain were performed with the 151 channel MEG system called SARA (SQUID Array for Reproductive Assessment). Two tone bursts were presented in a sequence of a standard complex tone of 500 Hz intermixed with a deviant complex tone of 750 Hz in 12% of the stimuli, inter-stimulus interval 800+/-100 ms. Eighteen pregnant women between 28th and 39th gestational weeks participated in the study. Measurements were performed every two weeks and once after delivery. The averaged evoked responses to stan...

This research was supported by the General Research Fund of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Research Grants Council (CUHK: 451811) to Catherine McBride. We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier version of this article. We also thank all helpers on the data collection, and children and parents for their participation.

Consonants, unlike vowels, are thought to be speech specific and therefore no interactions would be expected between consonants and pitch, a basic element for musical tones. The present study used an electrophysiological approach to investigate whether, contrary to this view, there is integrative processing of consonants and pitch by measuring additivity of changes in the mismatch negativity (MMN) of evoked potentials. The MMN is elicited by discriminable variations occurring in a sequence of repetitive, homogeneous sounds. In the experiment, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants heard frequently sung consonant-vowel syllables and rare stimuli deviating in either consonant identity only, pitch only, or in both dimensions. Every type of deviation elicited a reliable MMN. As expected, the two single-deviant MMNs had similar amplitudes, but that of the double-deviant MMN was also not significantly different from them. This absence of additivity in the double-...

"The study of speech perception has been separated traditionally from that of general auditory science. Studies based on the belief that speech perception relies on a specialized (modular) perceptual system distinct from general auditory processing, such as Jusczyk and Bertoncini (1988) have been widely accepted amongst researchers, based in many cases on the Motor Theory of speech perception (Liberman & Mattingly, 1985). This issue was raised by Samuel & Tartter, whose 1986 work aimed at finding out whether explanations of speech perception could be based on general acoustic properties of the signal, or whether they required speech-specific phonetic mechanisms. This has changed thanks to the focus of researchers on how perception of speech is influenced by working memory, attention, neural dynamics, and general processing at peripheral and central levels, which suggest that speech perception is not inherently different from other types of auditory processing. One of the main issues in the L2 acquisition of phonemic distinctions is whether learners are able to perceive new phonemes before effectively producing them. Even though the general consensus is that perception precedes production (Altvater-Mackensen & Fikkert, 2010), four possibilities are to be considered: (a) learners who can neither perceive nor produce  new phonemes; (b) learners who can both perceive and produce new phonemes; (c) learners who can perceive but are not able to produce new phonemes; and (d) learners who cannot perceive but are able to produce new phonemes. In addition to adult or adolescents who possess already a fixed L1 learning a new language in either an instruction or a naturalistic context, infants who are simultaneous bilinguals and children who are sequential bilinguals need to be considered as well in both contexts in order to have a clearer picture of the processing of phonemes and sounds in general by the brain. Studying the way this takes place can provide us with information on how speech perception is accomplished and, on the other hand, research on speech perception can help us understand how the auditory system functions; therefore, theories of general perceptual-cognitive processing are crucial to understand the auditory dynamics involved in speech processing.
The term 'cognition' is associated to the concept of knowledge, and has been used specifically to designate the conditions that allow humans to develop knowledge of the world, brought to us by our senses. Without perception, no knowledge would exist, at least in the way we have come to understand it. To emphaslze the cognitive aspects of audition is fundamental to understand the way auditory information is part of the equation in the development of knowledge.
The present study would aim to help us understand how the brain responds to old (native) versus new (non-native) phonemes (vowels) by analyzing the pattern of cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) as an electrophysiological measure of human speech encoding, the same way Agung, Purdy, McMahon & Newall (2006) did to study vocalic processing in auditorily impaired subjects. Another measure to be used is MMNs (mismatch negativities) in ERPs (event-related potentials), as Cheour, Kushnerenko, Čeponienė, Fellman & Näätänen (2002) did to find out whether duration changes in complex harmonic tones provoked a significant MMN response in newborns. The analysis of the types of features that contribute to this distinction/contrast in infants and children raised in Spanish-speaking households in the US, and in newly arrived monolingual (Spanish-speaking) immigrants in the US with little or no previous exposure to English may help us understand how coexistent phonemic systems are developed."