title: The auditory novelty system: an attempt to integrate human and animal research.
abstract: In this account, we attempt to integrate two parallel, but thus far, separate lines of research on auditory novelty detection: (1) human studies of EEG recordings of the mismatch negativity (MMN), and (2) animal studies of single-neuron recordings of stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA). The studies demonstrating the existence of novelty neurons showing SSA at different levels along the auditory pathway's hierarchy, together with the recent results showing human auditory-evoked potential correlates of deviance detection at very short latencies, that is, at 20-40 ms from change onset, support the view that novelty detection is a key principle that governs the functional organization of the auditory system. Furthermore, the generation of the MMN recorded from the human scalp seems to involve a cascade of neuronal processing that occurs at different successive levels of the auditory system's hierarchy.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior (IR3C), University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain; Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
authors.forename: Carles
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Escera
authors.forename: Manuel S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Malmierca
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D016057:Evoked Potentials, Auditory, Brain Stem / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D012106:Research; D013045:Species Specificity
keywords: Auditory brainstem response (ABR); Change detection; Evoked potentials; Middle-latency responses (MLR); Mismatch negativity (MMN); Single unit recordings; Stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA)