title: Temporal grouping affects the automatic processing of deviant sounds.
abstract: The present study investigates the influence of auditory temporal grouping on automatic sound processing. We compared the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potential elicited by successive deviant tones in a condition in which sounds were organized in tone pairs with respective MMN obtained in a non-paired sequence. When successive deviants belonged to different tone pairs the second deviant elicited a higher MMN amplitude than the corresponding deviant in the non-paired condition. Moreover, this temporal grouping had immediate effects on the extraction of rules as revealed by the finding that first and single deviants at the second position of a tone pair elicited larger MMNs than corresponding deviants in the non-paired condition or first and single deviants at the first position of a tone pair. Results demonstrate that auditory objects generated by temporal proximity are treated as relatively encapsulated units and that automatic deviance-detection may rely on multiple hierarchically organized representations of sound sequences.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Psychologie I, Universität Leipzig, Seeburgstrasse 14-20, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany. dagmar_mueller@uni-leipzig.de
authors.forename: Dagmar
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Müller
authors.forename: Erich
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Schröger
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001245:Association Learning / Q000502:physiology; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D003265:Contingent Negative Variation / Q000502:physiology*; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral / Q000502:physiology; D004585:Electrooculography; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010898:Pitch Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013998:Time Perception / Q000502:physiology*