Institute of Psychology, University of Leipzig, Neumarkt 9-19, D-04109, Leipzig, Germany,
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2013 Dec;13(4):930-43. doi: 10.3758/s13415-013-0173-7.
Discriminating personally significant from nonsignificant sounds is of high behavioral relevance and appears to be performed effortlessly outside of the focus of attention. Although there is no doubt that we automatically monitor our auditory environment for unexpected, and hence potentially significant, events, the characteristics of detection mechanisms based on individual memory schemata have been far less explored. The experiments in the present study were designed to measure event-related potentials (ERPs) sensitive to the discrimination of personally significant and nonsignificant nonlinguistic sounds. Participants were presented with random sequences of acoustically variable sounds, one of which was associated with personal significance for each of the participants. In Experiment 1, each participant's own mobile SMS ringtone served as his or her significant sound. In Experiment 2, a nonsignificant sound was instead trained to become personally significant to each participant over a period of one month. ERPs revealed differential processing of personally significant and nonsignificant sounds from about 200 ms after stimulus onset, even when the sounds were task-irrelevant. We propose the existence of a mechanism for the detection of significant sounds that does not rely on the detection of acoustic deviation. From a comparison of the results from our active- and passive-listening conditions, this discriminative process based on individual memory schemata seems to be obligatory, whereas the impact of individual memory schemata on further stages of auditory processing may require top-down guidance.
区分个人有意义和无意义的声音与行为高度相关，而且似乎是在注意力之外毫不费力地进行的。虽然毫无疑问，我们会自动监控我们的听觉环境，以发现意外的、因此可能有意义的事件，但基于个体记忆图式的检测机制的特征还远未得到充分探索。本研究中的实验旨在测量对个人有意义和无意义的非语言声音进行区分的事件相关电位 (ERP)。参与者被呈现随机序列的听觉变化声音，其中一个声音与每个参与者的个人意义相关。在实验 1 中，每个参与者自己的手机短信铃声作为其有意义的声音。在实验 2 中，相反，经过一个月的训练，一个无意义的声音对每个参与者变得有意义。ERP 揭示了在刺激开始后约 200 毫秒对个人有意义和无意义的声音进行差异处理，即使声音是任务无关的。我们提出存在一种用于检测有意义声音的机制，该机制不依赖于对声音偏差的检测。通过比较我们的主动和被动聆听条件的结果，这种基于个体记忆图式的辨别过程似乎是强制性的，而个体记忆图式对听觉处理的进一步阶段的影响可能需要自上而下的指导。
