Wavelet-based analysis of MMN responses in children

Abstract

Event-related potentials (ERPs) as part of the EEG are applied to assess auditory processing in children. Mismatch negativity (MMN) is a change-specific component of ERPs that indicates a pre-cognitive discrimination process. MMN responses were recorded in 10 healthy preschool children to four different types of signal changes. The signals investigated were processed using a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to analyze the characteristics of the ERP components. All children showed distinct MMN that was significant in all tasks. The MMN amplitudes varied between subjects and depended on the different tasks. The wavelet transform allowed simplified analysis and quantification of the MMN component, as well as the double-peak structure of the P1 component. The variation in MMN amplitudes suggests the possibility of determining individual auditory profiles. Owing to the shorter time required, the MMN paradigm suggested combined with the DWT proposed offers a new objective investigation method for children.

Correlation between Psychometric Tests and Mismatch Negativity in Preschool Children

“…Applying the updated paradigm [44] it only takes about 15 min (without breaks) to record the EEG data. The new paradigm was able to detect MMN in preschool children: comparing MMN values with other studies using different paradigms [51,52] , there are similar results.…”

“…A new MMN paradigm in pseudorandomized order (fixed interstimulus interval of 500 ms) slightly different from the latest 5-deviant paradigm [25] was used. Two standards were followed by one randomly chosen deviant (2: 1) [44] . Because of the significant drop in MMN magnitude after the first 10 min of measuring [45] , the recordings were conducted 3 times placing breaks of 5 min between them.…”

“…Finally, in this study we introduced an objective statistical method of extracting MMN [44] allowing reproducibility and objective comparison with future work.…”

A wavelet based algorithm for the identification of oscillatory event-related potential components

“…Methods based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) (Burger et al, 2007;Herrera et al, 2000) and continuous wavelet transform(CWT) (Bostanov and Kotchoubey, 2004), in combination with other statistical measures (Lim et al, 1995), have been tried for the detection as well as the analysis of ERPs. Variable threshold schemes (Fatourechi et al, 2004) and wavelet packet analysis (Graimann et al, 2004) have shown reasonable results when there is no background noise.…”

The New Method of Electroencephalogram Representation

“…The other methods of EEG representations are network architecture for classifying feature vectors symbolizing portions of an electroencephalogram (EEG) trace of a human subject (Felzer and Freisleben 2003) and the spectral decomposition of source EEG signals (Burger and Hoppe 2007;Akin and Kiymik 2000). Evidently, that the visual analysis of positional relationship of dozens vectors in multivariate space is to the utmost inconvenient.…”