The Five Myths of MMN: Redefining How to Use MMN in Basic and Clinical Research

Abstract

The goal of this review article is to redefine what the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) component of event-related potentials reflects in auditory scene analysis, and to provide an overview of how the MMN serves as a valuable tool in Cognitive Neuroscience research. In doing so, some of the old beliefs (five common ‘myths’) about MMN will be dispelled, such as the notion that MMN is a simple feature discriminator and that attention itself modulates MMN elicitation. A revised description of what MMN truly reflects will be provided, which includes a principal focus onto the highly context-dependent nature of MMN elicitation and new terminology to discuss MMN and attention. This revised framework will help clarify what has been a long line of seemingly contradictory results from studies in which behavioral ability to hear differences between sounds and passive elicitation of MMN have been inconsistent. Understanding what MMN is will also benefit clinical research efforts by providing a new picture of how to design appropriate paradigms suited to various clinical populations.

Voluntary action modulates the brain response to rule-violating events indexed by visual mismatch negativity

“…This strongly suggests that predictive processes underlying visual MMN elicitation can operate automatically without substantial attentional requirements. The present result, together with those obtained in these previous studies, leads to the notion that (1) predictive processes can operate automatically, but are susceptible to the influence of top-down control, and (2) top-down influences on predictive processes as measured by visual MMN become obvious specifically when top-down processes drastically change the visual event to be predicted (for an associated proposal, see Sussman, 2007;Sussman et al, 2014). According to this notion, simple manipulation of the task load cannot significantly affect visual MMN elicitation, since it does not change the visual event to be predicted.…”

A roadmap for the study of conscious audition and its neural basis

“…R. Soc. B 372: 20160103 by attention [117] and perceptual organization [118], and (ii) that generation of the MMN requires perceptual awareness of the standard stream [110]. The latter study embedded classical oddball sequences into multitone masker stimuli and had listeners indicate their perceptual awareness of the repetitive standard sounds; the MMN was evoked only when listeners were aware of the standard stream prior to the onset of the deviant, but not when the standard stream remained subliminal.…”

Moving Sensory Adaptation beyond Suppressive Effects in Single Neurons

“…Specifically, the auditory evoked potential is larger when a sound is presented rarely, or embedded in a sequence of different sounds, than when it is presented frequently — an enhanced response called the ‘mismatch negativity’ [110]. Many instantiations of the mismatch negativity can be explained by stimulus-specific fatigue [111,112], but other work suggests the mismatch negativity reflects a more sophisticated predictive scheme [113–115]. At the perceptual level, unexpected stimuli that are associated with a mismatch negativity are also detected more easily [115,116].…”