title: Rubberband Effect in Temporal Control of Mismatch Negativity.
abstract: Mismatch negativity (MMN) is a difference event-related potential (ERP) wave reflecting the brain's automatic reaction to deviant sensory stimuli, and it has been proven to be a useful tool in research on cognitive functions or clinical disorders. In most MMN studies, amplitude, peak latency, or the integral of the responses, in rare cases also the slopes of the responses, have been employed as parameters of the ERP responses for quantitative analyses. However, little is known about correlations between these parameters. To better understand the relations between different ERP parameters, we extracted and correlated several different parameters characterizing the MMN waves. We found an unexpected correlation which gives new insight into the temporal control of MMN: response amplitudes are positively correlated with downside slopes, whereas barely correlated with upside slopes. This result suggests an efficient feedback mechanism for the MMN to return to the baseline within a predefined time window, contradicting an exponential decay function as one might expect. As a metaphor we suggest a rubberband effect for the MMN responses, i.e., the larger the distance of the response from neural equilibrium, the stronger the return force to equilibrium.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education) and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking UniversityBeijing, China; Departments of Neurosurgery and Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, HoustonTX, USA.
authors.forename: Lingyan
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education) and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Xiaoxiong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Bin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education) and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking UniversityBeijing, China; Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of SciencesBeijing, China; Institute of Medical Psychology and Human Science Center, Ludwig-Maximilians-UniversityMunich, Germany.
authors.forename: Ernst
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Pöppel
authors.affiliation: School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education) and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking UniversityBeijing, China; Institute of Medical Psychology and Human Science Center, Ludwig-Maximilians-UniversityMunich, Germany.
authors.forename: Yan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Bao
keywords: correlation; event related potential; mismatch negativity; oddball paradigm; time window