Auditory representations for long lasting sounds: Insights from event-related brain potentials and neural oscillations

Abstract

Numerous studies revealed that the sound’s basic features like its frequency and intensity including their temporal dynamics are integrated in a unitary representation. That research focused on short, discrete sounds and mainly disregarded how our brain processes long lasting sounds. We review research utilizing the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) event-related potential and neural oscillatory activity for studying representations for long lasting simple sounds such as sinusoidal tones and complex sounds like speech. We report evidence for a critical temporal constraint for the formation of adequate representations for sounds lasting >350 ms. However, we present research showing that the time-variant characteristics (auditory edges) within long lasting sounds exceeding 350 ms enables the formation of auditory representations. We argue that each edge may open an integration window for a sound representation and that the representations established in adjacent temporal windows of integration can be concatenated into an auditory representation of a long sound.