Separating acoustic deviance from novelty during the first year of life: a review of event-related potential evidence

Abstract

Orienting to salient events in the environment is a first step in the development of attention in young infants. Electrophysiological studies have indicated that in newborns and young infants, sounds with widely distributed spectral energy, such as noise and various environmental sounds, as well as sounds widely deviating from their context elicit an event-related potential (ERP) similar to the adult P3a response. We discuss how the maturation of event-related potentials parallels the process of the development of passive auditory attention during the first year of life. Behavioral studies have indicated that the neonatal orientation to high-energy stimuli gradually changes to attending to genuine novelty and other significant events by approximately 9 months of age. In accordance with these changes, in newborns, the ERP response to large acoustic deviance is dramatically larger than that to small and moderate deviations. This ERP difference, however, rapidly decreases within first months of life and the differentiation of the ERP response to genuine novelty from that to spectrally rich but repeatedly presented sounds commences during the same period. The relative decrease of the response amplitudes elicited by high-energy stimuli may reflect development of an inhibitory brain network suppressing the processing of uninformative stimuli. Based on data obtained from healthy full-term and pre-term infants as well as from infants at risk for various developmental problems, we suggest that the electrophysiological indices of the processing of acoustic and contextual deviance may be indicative of the functioning of auditory attention, a crucial prerequisite of learning and language development.

Processing of Horizontal Sound Localization Cues in Newborn Infants

“…In contrast, ILD and ear of stimulation deviants elicited negative differential responses of more central scalp 13 distribution in the same latency range. The latter polarity and scalp distribution is similar to the early negativity observed by several previous ERP studies in neonates for spectrally rich deviant sounds (Kushnerenko et al 2007(Kushnerenko et al , 2013. Therefore, although Bundy (1980) found no evidence for sensitivity to change in ILD until 16 weeks of age as measured with a visual fixation paradigm, we can conclude that the neonatal auditory cortex is sensitive to deviation in ILD and the ear of stimulation.…”

“…However, FF deviants elicited a robust positive difference response in the 290-340 ms latency range. This response is similar to the "central positivity" described in many previous ERP studies of neonatal sound discrimination (Kushnerenko et al 2007(Kushnerenko et al , 2013). Thus we conclude that the newborn brain encodes changes in sound source location.…”

“…In infants, including newborns, deviant stimuli elicit a morphologically different mismatch response (MMR), which however possesses the main characteristics of the adult MMN component (Alho et al 1990;Kushnerenko et al 2002; for a review, see Kushnerenko et al 2013), including those necessary for assessing sensory discrimination (see, e.g., Novitsky et al…”

Developmental Trajectory of Audiovisual Speech Integration in Early Infancy. A Review of Studies Using the McGurk Paradigm

“…Th ese results added to the existing literature by showing that there are active neural mechanisms for mismatch detection in the infant brain not only for subsequent stimuli in the auditory modality (see Kushnerenko, Van den Bergh, & Winkler, 2013), but also for bimodal audiovisual stimuli. Originally, Kushnerenko et al (2008) suggested that this early capacity for detecting mismatch between auditory and visual speech information is a signature of an important neural mechanism that may assist infants' learning about native speech sounds.…”

Newborn Infants Detect Cues of Concurrent Sound Segregation

“…Although this suggests an early developmental time course for the processing of concurrent cues, one cannot infer that the capacity is innate given the widespread changes that auditory processing undergoes between birth and 6 months of age [11,12,13,14]. Fortunately, concurrent sound segregation can be measured not only behaviorally (which would be difficult in neonates) but also by electrophysiological methods.…”