Gösta Ekman Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.
Psychophysiology. 2019 Jan;56(1):e13280. doi: 10.1111/psyp.13280. Epub 2018 Sep 24.
The mismatch negativity (MMN) has been widely studied with oddball tasks to index processing of unexpected auditory change. The MMN is computed as the difference of deviant minus standard and is used to capture the pattern violation by the deviant. However, this oddball MMN is confounded because the deviant differs physically from the standard and is presented less often. To improve measurement, the same tone as the deviant is presented in a separate condition. This control tone is equiprobable with other tones and is used to compute a corrected MMN (deviant minus control). Typically, the tones are in random order except that consecutive tones are not identical (no-repetition rule). In contrast, a recent study on frequency MMN presented tones in a regular up-and-down sequence (cascade rule). If the cascade rule is detected more easily than the no-repetition rule, there should be a lower risk of a confounding MMN within the cascade condition. However, in previous research, the cascade and no-repetition conditions differed not only in the regularity of the tone sequence but also in number of tones, frequency range, and proportion of tones. We controlled for these differences to isolate effects of regularity in the tone sequence. Results of our preregistered analyses provided moderate evidence (BF >6) that the corrected MMN did not differ between cascade and no-repetition conditions. These findings imply that no-repetition and cascade rules are processed similarly and that the no-repetition condition provides an adequate control in frequency MMN.
失匹配负波（MMN）在以奇异性任务进行的广泛研究中被用于索引对听觉变化的意外处理。MMN 是通过偏差减去标准计算得出的，用于捕获偏差对模式的违反。然而，这种奇异性 MMN 是混杂的，因为偏差在物理上与标准不同，并且出现的频率较低。为了提高测量的准确性，在单独的条件下呈现与偏差相同的音调。这个控制音调与其他音调等概率出现，用于计算校正后的 MMN（偏差减去控制）。通常情况下，音调是随机出现的，除非连续的音调是相同的（无重复规则）。相比之下，最近一项关于频率 MMN 的研究以规则的升序和降序呈现音调（级联规则）。如果级联规则比无重复规则更容易被检测到，那么在级联条件下，混杂的 MMN 风险应该较低。然而，在之前的研究中，级联和无重复条件不仅在音调序列的规则性上有所不同，而且在音调数量、频率范围和音调比例上也有所不同。我们控制了这些差异，以隔离音调序列规则性的影响。我们预先注册分析的结果提供了中等程度的证据（BF >6），表明校正后的 MMN 在级联和无重复条件之间没有差异。这些发现意味着无重复和级联规则的处理方式相似，并且无重复条件在频率 MMN 中提供了足够的对照。
