Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Independent Research Group Neurocognition of Rhythm in Communication, Stephanstrasse 1a, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Biol Psychol. 2011 Apr;87(1):146-51. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2011.02.021. Epub 2011 Mar 5.
Temporal regularity allows predicting the temporal locus of future information thereby potentially facilitating cognitive processing. We applied event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate how temporal regularity impacts pre-attentive and attentive processing of deviance in the auditory modality. Participants listened to sequences of sinusoidal tones differing exclusively in pitch. The inter-stimulus interval (ISI) in these sequences was manipulated to convey either isochronous or random temporal structure. In the pre-attentive session, deviance processing was unaffected by the regularity manipulation as evidenced in three event-related-potentials (ERPs): mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, and reorienting negativity (RON). In the attentive session, the P3b was smaller for deviant tones embedded in irregular temporal structure, while the N2b component remained unaffected. These findings confirm that temporal regularity can reinforce cognitive mechanisms associated with the attentive processing of deviance. Furthermore, they provide evidence for the dynamic allocation of attention in time and dissociable pre-attentive and attention-dependent temporal processing mechanisms.
时间规律性允许预测未来信息的时间位置，从而有可能促进认知处理。我们应用事件相关脑电位（ERPs）来研究时间规律性如何影响听觉模式下偏差的非注意和注意加工。参与者听正弦音序列，这些序列仅在音高上有所不同。这些序列中的刺激间间隔（ISI）被操纵以传达等时或随机的时间结构。在非注意阶段，偏差处理不受规律性操纵的影响，这在三个事件相关电位（ERPs）中得到证明：失匹配负波（MMN）、P3a 和重新定向负波（RON）。在注意阶段，嵌入不规则时间结构中的偏差音的 P3b 较小，而 N2b 成分不受影响。这些发现证实了时间规律性可以增强与注意处理偏差相关的认知机制。此外，它们为注意力在时间上的动态分配以及可分离的非注意和注意依赖的时间处理机制提供了证据。
