Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen , Bergen, Norway.
Institute of Psychology, University of Tartu , Tartu, Estonia.
Cogn Neurosci. 2020 Jul;11(3):132-142. doi: 10.1080/17588928.2019.1648404. Epub 2019 Aug 1.
The auditory system is tuned to detect rhythmic regularities in the environment which can occur on different timescales. Event-related potentials such as mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3b are thought to index local and global deviance, respectively. However, it is not clear how these hierarchical levels interact and to what extent attention modulates this interaction. In this EEG study with 17 healthy young adults, we used a hierarchical oddball paradigm with local (sequence-level) and global (block-level) violations in attended and unattended conditions. Amplitude of N2 and P3b were analyzed in a 222 factorial model (local status, global status, attention condition). We found a significant interaction between the local and global status on the N2 amplitude, while there was no significant three-way interaction with attention, together demonstrating that lower-level prediction error is modulated by detection of higher-order regularity but expressed independently of attention. By contrast, higher-level prediction error, indexed by P3b, was sensitive to global regularity violations if the auditory stream was attended. The results demonstrate the capacity of our auditory perception to preattentively resolve conflicts between different levels of predictive hierarchy even across longer time intervals as indexed by MMN modulation, while P3b represents a different, attention-dependent system.
听觉系统能够探测环境中的节奏规律，这些规律可以在不同的时间尺度上发生。事件相关电位，如失匹配负波（MMN）和 P3b，分别被认为是局部和全局偏差的指标。然而，目前尚不清楚这些层次结构如何相互作用，以及注意力在多大程度上调节这种相互作用。在这项有 17 名健康年轻成年人参与的 EEG 研究中，我们使用了一个具有局部（序列级别）和全局（块级别）违规的分层奇数范式，分别在注意和不注意条件下进行。我们在 222 因子模型（局部状态、全局状态、注意条件）中分析了 N2 和 P3b 的振幅。我们发现 N2 振幅上存在局部和全局状态之间的显著交互作用，而与注意力的三向交互作用不显著，这表明较低层次的预测误差受到较高层次规则检测的调节，但与注意力无关。相比之下，如果听觉流受到注意，P3b 则对全局规则违规敏感。研究结果表明，即使在较长的时间间隔内，我们的听觉感知有能力预注意地解决不同层次的预测层次之间的冲突，这与 MMN 调制有关，而 P3b 则代表了一种不同的、依赖注意力的系统。
