Abstract
Detecting and orienting toward sounds carrying new information is a crucial feature of the human brain that supports adaptation to the environment. Rare, acoustically widely deviant sounds presented amongst frequent tones elicit large event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in neonates. Here we tested whether these discriminative ERP responses reflect only the activation of fresh afferent neuronal populations (i.e., neuronal circuits not affected by the tones) or they also index the processing of contextual mismatch between the rare and the frequent sounds. In two separate experiments, we presented sleeping newborns with 150 different environmental sounds and the same number of white noise bursts. Both sounds served either as deviants in an oddball paradigm with the frequent standard stimulus a tone (Novel/Noise deviant), or as the standard stimulus with the tone as deviant (Novel/Noise standard), or they were delivered alone with the same timing as the deviants in the oddball condition (Novel/Noise alone). Whereas the ERP responses to noise-deviants elicited similar responses as the same sound presented alone, the responses elicited by environmental sounds in the corresponding conditions morphologically differed from each other. Thus whereas the ERP response to the noise sounds can be explained by the different refractory state of stimulus-specific neuronal populations, the ERP response to environmental sounds indicated context-sensitive processing. These results provide evidence for an innate tendency of context-dependent auditory processing as well as a basis for the different developmental trajectories of processing acoustical deviance and contextual novelty.
Highlights
Orienting toward new information is arguably the aspect of attention appearing earliest in life
The event-related brain potentials (ERP) responses elicited in sleeping newborn infants were similar to those obtained in previous experiments (Sambeth et al, 2006; Kushnerenko et al, 2007)
In Experiment I, the rare environmental sounds delivered in the context of frequent pure tones elicited a positivity peaking between 200 and 400 ms over central and parietal sites (See Figure 1)
Summary
Orienting toward new information is arguably the aspect of attention appearing earliest in life. Some influential theories of perceptual object formation suggest a crucial role for contextual processing of sensory information (e.g., Ahissar and Hochstein, 2004; Bar, 2007). These theories assume that the perceiver has previously gathered a large amount of information about various contexts (scenes). This information must be learned during the course of life and cannot be available at birth In accordance with this notion, most descriptions suggest that newborn infants are initially predisposed to orienting toward salient stimulus features and processes relating the incoming information to some representation of the context gradually appear during the first few month of life (Gomes et al, 2000). Using a non-invasive brain measure event-related brain potentials (ERP), we tested the effects of acoustic context on the processing of widely deviant sounds
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