The Mechanisms and Meaning of the Mismatch Negativity

Abstract

The mismatch negativity (MMN) is a pre-attentive auditory event-related potential (ERP) component that is elicited by a change in a repetitive acoustic pattern. It is obtained by subtracting responses evoked by frequent 'standard' sounds from responses evoked by infrequent 'deviant' sounds that differ from the standards along some acoustic dimension, e.g., frequency, intensity, or duration, or abstract feature. The MMN has been attributed to neural generators within the temporal and frontal lobes. The mechanisms and meaning of the MMN continue to be debated. Two dominant explanations for the MMN have been proposed. According to the "neural adaptation" hypothesis, repeated presentation of the standards results in adapted (i.e., attenuated) responses of feature-selective neurons in auditory cortex. Rare deviant sounds activate neurons that are less adapted than those stimulated by the frequent standard sounds, and thus elicit a larger 'obligatory' response, which yields the MMN following the subtraction procedure. In contrast, according to the "sensory memory" hypothesis, the MMN is a 'novel' (non-obligatory) ERP component that reflects a deviation between properties of an incoming sound and those of a neural 'memory trace' established by the preceding standard sounds. Here, we provide a selective review of studies which are relevant to the controversy between proponents of these two interpretations of the MMN. We also present preliminary neurophysiological data from monkey auditory cortex with potential implications for the debate. We conclude that the mechanisms and meaning of the MMN are still unresolved and offer remarks on how to make progress on these important issues.

Experience-based Auditory Predictions Modulate Brain Activity to Silence as Do Real Sounds

“…In the same vein, the pitch modulation at 100 msec within posterior temporal cortices during the real sound was very similar (at both the spatial and temporal levels) to the one during the omission, suggesting that corresponding processes took place in the two conditions. As a third line of evidence speaking in favor of our interpretation, the latency of error detection processes such as the MMN generally takes place slightly later than our effects, at 150-200 msec (Fishman, 2014).…”

The context-contingent nature of cross-modal activations of the visual cortex

“…The aim of the manipulation was to induce in the participants predictions regarding the sound location, with these predictions being implicit in nature, as the sounds were presented within a completely passive paradigm. The efficacy of stimulus regularity in altering sensory processing has been repeatedly documented despite anaesthesia, sleep, and task-irrelevance of the stimuli, and reflected by presence of the mismatch-negativity responses (MMN; Escera et al, 2014;Fishman, 2014;Näätänen et al, 2014;Schröger et al, 2014;Todd et al, 2014). However, the current results cannot be interpreted within the MMN framework.…”

An acute dose, randomized trial of the effects of CDP-Choline on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) in healthy volunteers stratified by deviance detection level

“…It is the earliest neural sign of acoustic change detection, and although there are different explanations for the MMN (Fishman 2013;May and Tiitinin 2010), the "sensory memory" hypothesis proposes that it is an automatic, pre-attentive process that results from the comparison of standard and deviant memory traces of stimulus features in brief (lasting up to 30 sec) auditory ("echoic") sensory memory (Näätänen et al 2011). Greater discrepancies between deviant and standard memory traces (i.e., increasing deviance) are associated with larger MMN amplitudes and shorter latencies, both measures being correlated with behavioural discrimination of sounds (Näätänen et al 2012).…”