A neurophysiological correlate of animal novelty neurons recorded from the human scalp?

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event A neurophysiological correlate of animal novelty neurons recorded from the human scalp? Sabine Grimm1*, L. Slabu1, J. Costa-Faidella1 and Carles Escera1 1 Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona , Spain Novelty detection is a crucial property of the auditory system which subserves an efficient representation of the acoustic input and allows at the same time for prompt adaptive behavior to potentially relevant new stimuli. In human studies, novelty detection is linked to the occurrence of the mismatch negativity (MMN) – a component of the scalp potential evoked by rare sounds. Recently, its underlying neural mechanisms have been presumed in the responsiveness of so-called novelty neurons found in animal studies whose discharge habituates with stimulus repetition but is restored with small changes in the stimulus properties. Being found at early latencies and on multiple stages of the auditory pathway, these probability-sensitive neural responses are thought to precede and probably induce the activity measured as the scalp MMN rather than being its direct neural correspondent. To further investigate the link between animal and human findings, the present study is looking for correlates of the early animal novelty responses in the human scalp potential. Therefore, we measured in 20 human subjects long-latency (LAEP) and middle-latency auditory evoked potentials (MAEP) to frequency deviants (p=0.2) in two ranges (800 Hz, 3730 Hz) in an oddball paradigm. Deviants were compared to physically identical stimuli presented with high probability in a reversed oddball block (standard) and in a block intermixing randomly five equally low probable tones of different frequencies (control). 960 trials were delivered for each condition with an inter-stimulus interval of 297 ms, and EEG was recorded with special settings (sampling rate: 2500 Hz; online-filter: 0.1 to 500 Hz), which allowed for the extraction of latencies and amplitudes of the MAEP components Na, Pa, Nb, and the MMN component of the LAEP in different offline analyses. In both frequency ranges we obtained a clear MMN with somewhat smaller amplitudes for the “true” MMN from the deviant-control comparison. More interestingly, already in the range of MAEP, the Nb component peaking at about 40-42 ms was enhanced for deviants compared to standards (repeated measures contrast: F(1,19)=9.98, p=0.005) and controls (repeated measures contrast: F(1,19)=6.57, p=0.019) in both frequency ranges. This response indexes an early process of novelty detection preceding the well-studied higher-order cognitive detection index. The finding strongly supports the idea of a multi-stage comparison processes serving auditory novelty detection and might be discussed as a human correlate of novelty neurons’ activity. Conference: MMN 09 Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications, Budapest, Hungary, 4 Apr - 7 Apr, 2009. Presentation Type: Oral Presentation Topic: Abstracts Citation: Grimm S, Slabu L, Costa-Faidella J and Escera C (2009). A neurophysiological correlate of animal novelty neurons recorded from the human scalp?. Conference Abstract: MMN 09 Fifth Conference on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and its Clinical and Scientific Applications. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.05.082 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 25 Mar 2009; Published Online: 25 Mar 2009. * Correspondence: Sabine Grimm, Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, sabine.grimm@uni-leipzig.de Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. 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