Extraction of the mismatch negativity elicited by sound duration decrements: A comparison of three procedures

Abstract: This study focuses on comparison of procedures for extracting the brain event-related potentials (ERPs) – brain responses to stimuli recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). These responses are used to study how the synchronization of brain electrical responses is associated with cognition such as how the brain detects changes in the auditory world. One such event-related response to auditory change is called mismatch negativity (MMN). It is typically observed by computing a difference wave between ERPs elicited by a frequently repeated sound and ERPs elicited by an infrequently occurring sound which differs from the repeated sounds. Fast and reliable extraction of the ERPs, such as the genuine MMN, is an important focus of studies devoted to basic cognitive brain research. In this study, we compared three procedures for extraction of the MMN elicited by infrequent duration decrements in auditory sound stimulation. These were the conventional difference wave (DW) with average standard sweep, optimal digital filtering (ODF), and recently proposed independent component analysis (ICA) decomposition procedures. The statistical comparison was made in a group of 12 healthy adults aged 23–30 years. The MMN was elicited in a passive oddball protocol presenting an auditory stimulation consisting of frequent tones of 600Hz of 100ms duration each (standard stimuli). Infrequently, one of the tones was shortened to 75, 50, or 30ms (deviant stimuli). The ICA decomposition procedure, similarly to the DW procedure with average standard sweep, extracted a cleaner MMN compared to the ODF procedure. Both procedures extracted the MMN, whose amplitude and latency characteristics concur with substantial number of publications in contrast to the ODF procedure. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]