Mismatch negativity in young children of alcoholics from high-density families.

The mismatch negativity (MMN) component of event-related potentials was recorded from a group of young children of alcoholics (n = 19, 8 females) with a high-density family history of alcoholism and from a control group (n = 23, 12 females), between 8 and 15 years of age. A dichotic listening task was used, and subjects had to pay attention to an oddball paradigm in one ear and ignore the stimuli in the other ear. The event-related potentials elicited by the standard unattended tones were subtracted from those elicited by the infrequent deviant unattended tones, and the MMN was measured at 10 frontal and central electrodes. No group differences were observed in peak latency, peak amplitude, and mean amplitude of the MMN. These results indicated that preattentive mechanisms of mismatch detection were not impaired in young subjects at high risk for alcoholism. Results are discussed in relation to differences in electrophysiological indexes of automatic versus controlled information processing and in relation to the characteristics of the sample.