The MMN attention effect revisited: Forming the standard or detecting the deviant?
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1
Institute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
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2
Department of Cognitive Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
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3
Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, United States
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4
Institute of Psychology, University of Szeged, Hungary
When participants detect deviations from a common feature of the sound sequence delivered to one ear, no or only a very small MMN is elicited by violating the same feature regularity of sound sequence delivered to the other ear (Näätänen et al., 1993; Sussman et al., 2003; Woldorff et al., 1991, 1998). Sussman et al. (2003) interpreted these results in terms of an attentional bias of the competition for processing resources. However, the nature of the processing resource remained unspecified. MMN elicitation requires that some regularity of a sound sequence is detected (forming the “standard”) and that a given sound is found to violate this regularity (deviance detection). Here we tested whether one or both of these processes are affected by selective attention in a roving standard variant of Woldorff’s paradigm. Participants were on line instructed by a computer display either to detect intensity changes in the tone sequence presented to the left or the right ear (attend sound conditions) or to detect slight changes of the fixation cross (neutral condition). Pure tones alternated between the two ears with an overall 170-370 ms stimulus onset asynchrony. Left ear tones had 1500 Hz, right ear tones 2600 Hz frequency. Intensity changes of 10, 15, or 20 dB occurred with 6.25% probability, separately in the two ears. The task changed between the neutral and one of the two possible attend sound conditions after an average time interval of 10.8 s. (But the task never changed between two attend sound conditions.) When most standards preceding the deviant were unattended (i.e., occurred in the ear opposite to the attended one), no MMN was elicited even when the deviant itself was already delivered during the neutral condition. In contrast, when the deviant was unattended while most preceding standards were delivered during the neutral condition, MMN was elicited. These results suggest that building a regularity representation in the attended sound stream can prevent the formation of a similar regularity representation in concurrent unattended streams. Thus competition for forming regularity representations can be biased by selective attention.
Conference:
MMN 09
Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications, Budapest, Hungary, 4 Apr - 7 Apr, 2009.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Presentations
Citation:
Háden
GP,
Sussman
ES,
Czigler
I and
Winkler
I
(2009). The MMN attention effect revisited: Forming the standard or detecting the deviant?.
Conference Abstract:
MMN 09
Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.05.051
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Received:
24 Mar 2009;
Published Online:
24 Mar 2009.
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Correspondence:
Gabor P Háden, Institute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary, ghaden@cogsci.bme.hu