A window into the brain mechanisms associated with noise sensitivity.

Marina Kliuchko,Marja Heinonen-Guzejev,Mari Tervaniemi,Elvira Brattico,Peter Vuust

doi:10.1038/srep39236

Abstract

Noise sensitive individuals are more likely to experience negative emotions from unwanted sounds and they show greater susceptibility to adverse effects of noise on health. Noise sensitivity does not originate from dysfunctions of the peripheral auditory system, and it is thus far unknown whether and how it relates to abnormalities of auditory processing in the central nervous system. We conducted a combined electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography (M/EEG) study to measure neural sound feature processing in the central auditory system in relation to the individual noise sensitivity. Our results show that high noise sensitivity is associated with altered sound feature encoding and attenuated discrimination of sound noisiness in the auditory cortex. This finding makes a step towards objective measures of noise sensitivity instead of self-evaluation questionnaires and the development of strategies to prevent negative effects of noise on the susceptible population.

Highlights

Noise Degrades Central Auditory Processing in Toddlers
We presented 71 subjects with a multifeature mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm (Fig. 1), where a noise feature was embedded in an auditory complex context along with five other deviant features
We embedded a deviant with increased noisiness into the paradigm to test the efficiency of automatic processing and discrimination of this sound feature in noise sensitive individuals

Summary

Results

According to post hoc testing, the low NS group had stronger MMN to the noise deviant than medium and high NS groups (P = 0.002 and P = 0.010, respectively; Fig. 2). Analysis of MMNm (MEG equivalent of MMN) replicated the EEG results on the relationship between NS and MMN showing the main effect of Group (F2,66 = 3.36, P = 0.041, ηp 2 = 0.092) that was due to lower MMNm amplitudes in the high NS group than in the low NS group (LSD post hoc test: P = 0.012). We did not find significant effects of NS group on MMNm to any other deviant (ANCOVA results are reported in Table S3 of the Supplementary information)

Discussion

Methods

Background