Paavilainen P, Jaramillo M, Näätänen R
Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki, Finland.
Psychophysiology. 1998 Sep;35(5):483-7. doi: 10.1017/s0048577298970895.
Neural representations for abstract features of auditory stimuli were studied by presenting reading subjects with stimulus blocks composed of pairs of two closely spaced tones. There were frequent ascending standard pairs (i.e., the second tone was higher in frequency than the first tone) and occasional descending deviant pairs. Both types of pairs varied randomly over a wide frequency range. In separate blocks, the tones forming a pair were presented either to the same ear or to opposite ears. The deviant pairs elicited the mismatch negativity (MMN) in all conditions, which indicates that the brain can automatically extract and represent an abstract invariant feature (rise or fall) of stimulation above the point of binaural convergence and detect violations against it. Poor behavioral performance in an active discrimination task suggested that conscious discrimination processes can only partially use the outcome of the preattentive discrimination processes reflected by the MMN.
通过向阅读受试者呈现由两对间隔很近的音调组成的刺激块，研究了听觉刺激抽象特征的神经表征。有频繁出现的升序标准对（即第二个音调的频率高于第一个音调）和偶尔出现的降序偏差对。两种类型的对在很宽的频率范围内随机变化。在不同的块中，构成一对的音调要么呈现给同一只耳朵，要么呈现给相对的耳朵。在所有条件下，偏差对都会引发失配负波（MMN），这表明大脑可以自动提取和表征双耳汇聚点以上刺激的抽象不变特征（上升或下降），并检测对其的违反情况。在主动辨别任务中较差的行为表现表明，有意识的辨别过程只能部分利用MMN所反映的前注意辨别过程结果。
