title: A hierarchy of cortical responses to sequence violations in three-month-old infants.
abstract: The adult human brain quickly adapts to regular temporal sequences, and emits a sequence of novelty responses when these regularities are violated. These novelty responses have been interpreted as error signals that reflect the difference between the incoming signal and predictions generated at multiple cortical levels. Do infants already possess such a hierarchy of violation-detection mechanisms? Using high-density recordings of event-related potentials during an auditory local-global violation paradigm, we show that three-month-old infants process novelty in temporal sequences at two distinct levels. Violations of local expectancies, such as perceiving a deviant vowel "a" after repeated presentation of another vowel i-i-i, elicited an early auditory mismatch response. Conversely, violations of global expectancies, such as hearing the rare sequence a-a-a-a instead of the frequent sequence a-a-a-i, modulated this early mismatch response and led to a late frontal negative slow wave, whose cortical sources included the left inferior frontal region. These results suggest that the infant brain already possesses two dissociable systems for temporal sequence learning.
authors.affiliation: INSERM, U992, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; CEA, DSV/I2BM, NeuroSpin Center, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; University Paris-Sud, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France. Electronic address: anahita@basirat.fr.
authors.forename: Anahita
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Basirat
authors.affiliation: INSERM, U992, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; CEA, DSV/I2BM, NeuroSpin Center, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; University Paris-Sud, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; Collège de France, F-75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: Stanislas
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dehaene
authors.affiliation: INSERM, U992, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; CEA, DSV/I2BM, NeuroSpin Center, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France; University Paris-Sud, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France.
authors.forename: Ghislaine
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Dehaene-Lambertz
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000254:growth & development / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D013060:Speech
keywords: Brain development; Mismatch response; Prediction; Rule extraction; Sequence learning