Preattentive detection of nonsalient contingencies between auditory features

Abstract

Extraction of contingencies between features of successive auditory stimuli was studied by exploiting the mismatch negativity component of the event-related potential. According to the rules hidden in the stimulus sequences, one stimulus feature (duration) predicted another feature (pitch) of the next stimulus. Occasional deviant stimuli, violating the rules, elicited a mismatch negativity although the participants were ignoring the stimuli. Mismatch negativity was also elicited when the participants tried to detect the deviant stimuli. Their detection performance, however, was poor and on the basis of subsequent interviews, they were not consciously aware of the rules. The results suggest that contingencies across-features of successive stimuli are extracted already at the early preattentive level in the auditory sensory memory.

I Heard That Coming: Event-Related Potential Evidence for Stimulus-Driven Prediction in the Auditory System

“…This is in line with findings on tone repetition (Haenschel et al, 2005;Baldeweg, 2006), deviance detection (Sussman and Winkler, 2001;Paavilainen et al, 2007;Bendixen et al, 2008), and music processing (Kraemer et al, 2005;Zanto et al, 2006;Ladinig et al, 2009;Winkler et al, 2009), as well as fitting to current theoretical accounts of the auditory system (Baldeweg, 2006;Schröger, 2007;Winkler, 2007;Dubnov, 2008). Predictions within the auditory system can also be linked to wider theories on sensory and motor systems (Friston, 2005;Prinz, 2006;Schubotz, 2007).…”

Preattentive and attentive responses to changes in small numerosities of tones in adult humans

“…Their low, yet APPROXIMATION IN THE SMALL NUMBER RANGE existing, false alarm rate (0.051) resulted in a low albeit above-zero d-prime value (0.362) for 5:1 deviants. These findings conform to previous MMN studies using other types of higher-order auditory changes with behavioral hit and false alarm rates comparable to those in the present study [29,44].…”

“…MMN was expected to be observed even if the changes were not attentively detectable in a subsequent behavioral task (see also, [29]). (Figure 2d).…”

Effects of prosodic familiarity on the automatic processing of words in the human brain

“…It is, however, unclear whether the MMNs in these studies were elicited by a change of word stress as a linguistic pattern or just changes in acoustical features, since no variation was introduced in the stimulation. The elicitation of MMN to words with a rare stress pattern presented amongst multiple words with another stress pattern, including a vast amount of acoustical variation, could be interpreted to reflect the processing of stress as a linguistically significant pattern (for MMN elicited by violations of patterns and abstract rules, see Paavilainen et al, 2007;Saarinen et al,1992, and for MMN elicited by violations of linguistic categories generated by multiple speech stimuli, see Phillips et al, 2000;Shestakova et al, 2002). Therefore, the present study aimed to determine how the familiarity of a prosodic pattern affects the automatic processing of words by using multiple stimuli with different sound combinations.…”