Search results for "Auditory Physiology"
showing 9 items of 9 documents
Acoustic communication in crocodilians: from behaviour to brain.
2009
Crocodilians and birds are the modern representatives of Phylum Archosauria. Although there have been recent advances in our understanding of the phylogeny and ecology of ancient archosaurs like dinosaurs, it still remains a challenge to obtain reliable information about their behaviour. The comparative study of birds and crocodiles represents one approach to this interesting problem. One of their shared behavioural features is the use of acoustic communication, especially in the context of parental care. Although considerable data are available for birds, information concerning crocodilians is limited. The aim of this review is to summarize current knowledge about acoustic communication in…
The development of involuntary and voluntary attention from childhood to adulthood: A combined behavioral and event-related potential study
2006
Abstract Objective This study investigated auditory involuntary and voluntary attention in children aged 6–8, 10–12 and young adults. The strength of distracting stimuli (20% and 5% pitch changes) and the amount of allocation of attention were varied. Methods In an auditory distraction paradigm event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral data were measured from subjects either performing a sound duration discrimination task or watching a silent video. Results Pitch changed sounds caused prolonged reaction times and decreased hit rates in all age groups. Larger distractors (20%) caused stronger distraction in children, but not in adults. The amplitudes of mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, a…
Cognitive control after distraction: event-related brain potentials (ERPs) dissociate between different processes of attentional allocation.
2008
Attentional reallocation after a distracting event is an important function of cognitive control. This process is tapped by the reorienting negativity (RON) event-related brain potential. It was argued that the RON reflects orientation of attention to relevant information in working memory. To test this hypothesis participants performed an auditory duration discrimination task. The stimuli were presented in a frequent standard or a rare deviant pitch with deviants resulting in behavioral distraction. Participants accomplished this task under two conditions: In the refocus condition participants were asked to respond to every stimulus; in the reorient condition participants were instructed t…
Alterations in visual and auditory processing in hemispatial neglect: An evoked potential follow-up study
2010
Hemispatial neglect is common after cerebrovascular stroke in the right hemisphere. Cortical electrophysiological studies, especially investigations of both visual and auditory processing in subjects with neglect are sparse. Our purpose was to assess whether and to which extent subjects with neglect may show impairments in both visual and auditory processing. Thereby, we assessed the evolution of changes in sensory processing and neglect symptoms over a 6 month follow-up period. Twenty-one stroke subjects with hemispatial neglect were studied at baseline, 3 weeks later and at 6 months follow-up. At enrollment, 12 patients were in Acute/subacute and 9 were in the chronic stage of stroke. Vis…
Auditory cortical and hippocampal-system mismatch responses to duration deviants in urethane-anesthetized rats.
2013
Any change in the invariant aspects of the auditory environment is of potential importance. The human brain preattentively or automatically detects such changes. The mismatch negativity (MMN) of event-related potentials (ERPs) reflects this initial stage of auditory change detection. The origin of MMN is held to be cortical. The hippocampus is associated with a later generated P3a of ERPs reflecting involuntarily attention switches towards auditory changes that are high in magnitude. The evidence for this cortico-hippocampal dichotomy is scarce, however. To shed further light on this issue, auditory cortical and hippocampal-system (CA1, dentate gyrus, subiculum) local-field potentials were …
Diagnostic subgroups of developmental dyslexia have different deficits in neural processing of tones and phonemes.
2004
The present study addressed auditory processing in 8-11-year-old children with developmental dyslexia by means of event-related brain potentials (ERP). Cortical sound reception was evaluated by recording N250 responses to syllables and tones and cortical sound discrimination by analyzing the mismatch negativity (MMN) to syllable and tone changes. We found that both cortical sound reception and sound discrimination were impaired in dyslexic children. The analysis of the data obtained from two dyslexic subgroups, Dyslexics-1 being impaired in non-word reading (or both non-word and frequent word reading) and Dyslexics-2 in frequent word reading but not in non-word reading, revealed that the MM…
New fast mismatch negativity paradigm for determining the neural prerequisites for musical ability.
2011
Studies have consistently shown that the mismatch negativity (MMN) for different auditory features correlates with musical skills, and that this effect is more pronounced for stimuli integrated in complex musical contexts. Hence, the MMN can potentially be used for determining the development of auditory skills and musical expertise. MMN paradigms, however, are typically very long in duration, and far from sounding musical. Therefore, we developed a novel multi-feature MMN paradigm with 6 different deviant types integrated in a complex musical context of no more than 20 min in duration. We found significant MMNs for all 6 deviant types. Hence, this short objective measure can putatively be …
Informal musical activities are linked to auditory discrimination and attention in 2-3-year-old children: an event-related potential study
2012
The relation between informal musical activities at home and electrophysiological indices of neural auditory change detection was investigated in 2-3-year-old children. Auditory event-related potentials were recorded in a multi-feature paradigm that included frequency, duration, intensity, direction, gap deviants and attention-catching novel sounds. Correlations were calculated between these responses and the amount of musical activity at home (i.e. musical play by the child and parental singing) reported by the parents. A higher overall amount of informal musical activity was associated with larger P3as elicited by the gap and duration deviants, and smaller late discriminative negativity r…
Source localization of event-related potentials to pitch change mapped onto age-appropriate MRIs at 6 months-of-age
2010
Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) have been used to understand how the brain processes auditory input, and to track developmental change in sensory systems. Localizing ERP generators can provide invaluable insights into how and where auditory information is processed. However, age-appropriate infant brain templates have not been available to aid such developmental mapping. In this study, auditory change detection responses of brain ERPs were examined in 6-month-old infants using discrete and distributed source localization methods mapped onto age-appropriate magnetic resonance images. Infants received a passive oddball paradigm using fast-rate non-linguistic auditory stimuli (tone do…