title: Involvement of the human midbrain and thalamus in auditory deviance detection.
abstract: Prompt detection of unexpected changes in the sensory environment is critical for survival. In the auditory domain, the occurrence of a rare stimulus triggers a cascade of neurophysiological events spanning over multiple time-scales. Besides the role of the mismatch negativity (MMN), whose cortical generators are located in supratemporal areas, cumulative evidence suggests that violations of auditory regularities can be detected earlier and lower in the auditory hierarchy. Recent human scalp recordings have shown signatures of auditory mismatch responses at shorter latencies than those of the MMN. Moreover, animal single-unit recordings have demonstrated that rare stimulus changes cause a release from stimulus-specific adaptation in neurons of the primary auditory cortex, the medial geniculate body (MGB), and the inferior colliculus (IC). Although these data suggest that change detection is a pervasive property of the auditory system which may reside upstream cortical sites, direct evidence for the involvement of subcortical stages in the human auditory novelty system is lacking. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging during a frequency oddball paradigm, we here report that auditory deviance detection occurs in the MGB and the IC of healthy human participants. By implementing a random condition controlling for neural refractoriness effects, we show that auditory change detection in these subcortical stations involves the encoding of statistical regularities from the acoustic input. These results provide the first direct evidence of the existence of multiple mismatch detectors nested at different levels along the human ascending auditory pathway.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior (IR3C), University of Barcelona, Passeig de la vall d'Hebron 171, 08035 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain; Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, Passeig de la vall d'Hebron 171, 08035 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
authors.forename: Raffaele
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Cacciaglia
authors.affiliation: Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior (IR3C), University of Barcelona, Passeig de la vall d'Hebron 171, 08035 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain; Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, Passeig de la vall d'Hebron 171, 08035 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Electronic address: cescera@ub.edu.
authors.forename: Carles
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Escera
authors.affiliation: Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior (IR3C), University of Barcelona, Passeig de la vall d'Hebron 171, 08035 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain; Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, Passeig de la vall d'Hebron 171, 08035 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
authors.forename: Lavinia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Slabu
authors.affiliation: Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior (IR3C), University of Barcelona, Passeig de la vall d'Hebron 171, 08035 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain; Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, Passeig de la vall d'Hebron 171, 08035 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
authors.forename: Sabine
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Grimm
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University Jaume I, Avenguda de Vicent Sos Baynat, 12 071 Castellón de la Plana, Spain; Language Group Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging University College of London, 12 Queen Square, WC1N 3BG London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Ana
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sanjuán
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University Jaume I, Avenguda de Vicent Sos Baynat, 12 071 Castellón de la Plana, Spain.
authors.forename: Noelia
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ventura-Campos
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University Jaume I, Avenguda de Vicent Sos Baynat, 12 071 Castellón de la Plana, Spain.
authors.forename: César
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ávila
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001306:Auditory Pathways / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005829:Geniculate Bodies / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007245:Inferior Colliculi / Q000502:physiology*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008636:Mesencephalon / Q000502:physiology*; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D013788:Thalamus / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Auditory deviance detection; Inferior colliculus; Medial geniculate body; Stimulus-specific adaptation; fMRI