Attentional Bias in Patients with Decompensated Tinnitus: Prima Facie Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

Abstract

Tinnitus refers to the auditory perception of sound in the absence of external sound or electric stimuli. The influence of tinnitus on cognitive processing is at the cutting edge of ongoing tinnitus research. In this study, we adopted an objective indicator of attentional processing, i.e. the mismatch negativity (MMN), to assess the attentional bias in patients with decompensated tinnitus. Three kinds of pure tones, D₁ (8,000 Hz), S (8,500 Hz) and D₂ (9,000 Hz), were used to induce event-related potentials (ERPs) in the normal ear. Employing the oddball paradigm, the task was divided into two blocks in which D₁ and D₂ were set as deviation stimuli, respectively. Only D₂ induced a significant MMN in the tinnitus group, while neither D₁ nor D₂ was able to induce MMN in the control group. In addition, the ERPs in the left hemisphere, which were recorded within the time window of 90-150 ms (ERP_{90-150 ms}), were significantly higher than those in the right hemisphere in the tinnitus group, while no significant difference was observed in the control group. Lastly, the amplitude of ERP_{90-150 ms} in the tinnitus group was significantly higher than that in the control group. These findings suggest that patients with decompensated tinnitus showed automatic processing of acoustic stimuli, thereby indicating that these patients allocated more cognitive resources to acoustic stimulus processing. We suggest that the difficulty in disengaging or facilitated attention of patients might underlie this phenomenon. The limitations of the current study are discussed.

Aberrant Frequency Related Change-Detection Activity in Chronic Tinnitus

“…The study reported that the 9000 Hz frequency induced a significant MMN in the group with tinnitus, and the amplitude of ERP between 90 and 150 ms was significantly higher in the group with tinnitus compared to the control group. The study proposed that persons with tinnitus may utilize automatic processing of acoustic stimuli and therefore may allocate more cognitive resources for such processing (Li et al, 2016).…”

“…After baseline selection, the amplitude of labeled MMN peaks was calculated for six channels (F3, Fz, F4, FC3, FCz, and FC4) where MMN had the highest activity in the region of interest (ROI) channels extracting the frontal subcomponent of the MMN (Giard et al, 1990;Li et al, 2016). Also, for extracting the supratemporal subcomponent of the MMN, peaks were calculated for two channels, namely, M1 and M2 (Näätänen et al, 1978).…”

Eyes and Ears: Cross-Modal Interference of Tinnitus on Visual Processing

“…In a previous research based on cue-target paradigm, there had the interstimulus interval (ISI) between the cue and the target ( Chica et al, 2014 ), attention resources can be detached from cues to target stimuli, which affected the processing of target stimuli by individuals. However, the attention resources occupied by tinnitus were difficult to separate from the tinnitus signal ( Li et al, 2016 ), thus tinnitus was hard to relate to target stimulation and cannot act as the spatial cue in visual processing.…”

Effects of Speech Phonological Features during Passive Perception on Cortical Auditory Evoked Potential in Sensorineural Hearing Loss

“…The difference of the CAEP waveform for each set of speech stimulus was used to measure the MMN response, which was obtained by subtracting the averaged responses of the deviant stimuli from the averaged responses of the same stimuli presented as the standard. MMN was defined as a component having the largest negativity occurring between 100-250 ms at electrode positions Fz or Cz (Duncan et al 2009;Li et al 2016). The appearance of MMN was confirmed when it had more negative amplitudes at the fronto-central electrode site (Fz and Cz) in comparison with the parietal site (Pz).…”