Searching for the Mismatch Negativity in Primary Auditory Cortex of the Awake Monkey: Deviance Detection or Stimulus Specific Adaptation?

Neurons in primary auditory cortex (A1) are known to exhibit a phenomenon known as stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA), which means that, when tested with pure tones, they will respond more strongly to a particular frequency if it is presented as a rare, unexpected “oddball” stimulus than when the same stimulus forms part of a series of common, “standard” stimuli. Although SSA has occasionally been observed in midbrain neurons that form part of the paraleminscal auditory pathway, it is thought to be weak, rare, or nonexistent among neurons of the leminscal pathway that provide the main afferent input to A1, so that SSA seen in A1 is likely generated within A1 by local mechanisms. To study the contributions that neural processing within the different cytoarchitectonic layers of A1 may make to SSA, we recorded local field potentials in A1 of the rat in response to standard and oddball tones and subjected these to current source density analysis. Although our results show that SSA can be observed throughout all layers of A1, right from the earliest part of the response, there are nevertheless significant differences between layers, with SSA becoming significantly stronger as stimulus-related activity passes from the main thalamorecipient layers III and IV to layer V.

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Spectrotemporal Analysis of Evoked and Induced Electroencephalographic Responses in Primary Auditory Cortex (A1) of the Awake Monkey

Cerebral Cortex ◽

10.1093/cercor/bhm094 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 18 (3) ◽

pp. 610-625 ◽

Cited By ~ 85

Author(s):

M. Steinschneider ◽

Y. I. Fishman ◽

J. C. Arezzo

Keyword(s):

Auditory Cortex ◽

Primary Auditory Cortex ◽

Awake Monkey

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Detection of stimulus deviance within primate primary auditory cortex: intracortical mechanisms of mismatch negativity (MMN) generation

Brain Research ◽

10.1016/0006-8993(94)91496-6 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 667 (2) ◽

pp. 192-200 ◽

Cited By ~ 132

Author(s):

Daniel C. Javit ◽

Mitchell Steinschneider ◽

Charles E. Schroeder ◽

Herbert G. Vaughan ◽

Joseph C. Arezzo

Keyword(s):

Auditory Cortex ◽

Mismatch Negativity ◽

Primary Auditory Cortex

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Mismatch Negativity and Stimulus-Specific Adaptation in Animal Models

Journal of Psychophysiology ◽

10.1027/0269-8803.21.34.214 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 21 (3-4) ◽

pp. 214-223 ◽

Cited By ~ 120

Author(s):

Israel Nelken ◽

Nachum Ulanovsky

Keyword(s):

Animal Models ◽

Auditory Cortex ◽

Change Detection ◽

Neural Activity ◽

Mismatch Negativity ◽

Single Neuron ◽

Neural Processing ◽

Sensory Coding ◽

Methodological Issues ◽

Specific Adaptation

Animal models of MMN may serve both to further our understanding of neural processing beyond pure sensory coding and for unraveling the neural and pharmacological processes involved in the generation of MMN. We start this review by discussing the methodological issues that are especially important when pursuing a single-neuron correlate of MMN. Correlates of MMN have been studied in mice, rats, cats, and primates. Whereas essentially all of these studies demonstrated the presence of stimulus-specific adaptation, in the sense that responses to deviant tones are larger than the responses to standard tones, the presence of real MMN has been established only in a few. We argue for the use of more and better controls in order to clarify the situation. Finally, we discuss in detail the relationships between stimulus-specific adaptation of single-neuron responses, as established in the cat auditory cortex, and MMN. We argue that this is currently the only fully established correlate of true change detection, and hypothesize that it precedes and probably induces the neural activity that is eventually measured as MMN.

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