Biomedical subjects

M Tervaniemi

Publications and source records attributed to M Tervaniemi.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Practice strategies of musicians modulate neural processing and the learning of sound-patterns.

Previous studies suggest that pre-attentive auditory processing of musicians differs depending on the strategies used in music practicing and performance. This study aimed at systematically revealing whether there are differences in auditory processing between musicians preferring and not-preferring aural strategies such as improvising, playing by ear, and rehearsing by listening to records. Participants were assigned to aural and non-aural groups according to how much they employ aural strategies, as determined by a questionnaire. The change-related mismatch negativity (MMN) component of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) was used to probe pre-attentive neural discrimination of simple sound features and melody-like patterns. Further, the musicians' behavioral accuracy in sound perception was tested with a discrimination task and the AMMA musicality test. The data indicate that practice strategies do not affect musicians' pre-attentive neural discrimination of changes in simple sound features but do modulate the speed of neural discrimination of interval and contour changes within melody-like patterns. Moreover, while the aural and non-aural groups did not differ in their initial neural accuracy for discriminating melody-like patterns, they differed after a focused training session. A correlation between behavioral and neural measures was also obtained. Taken together, these results suggest that auditory processing of musicians who prefer aural practice strategies differs in melodic contour and interval processing and perceptual learning, rather than in simple sound processing, in comparison to musicians preferring other practice strategies.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2006

Frequency specific impairment of automatic pitch change detection by fMRI acoustic noise: an MEG study.

The loud acoustic noise produced by the magnetic resonance scanner is a major source of interference in auditory fMRI research. Whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) was used to investigate the interaction between the frequency range of auditory stimulation and fMRI acoustic noise. Pure tones and 3-harmonic complexes varying between 240 and 1240 Hz in frequency were presented while participants attended to a silent subtitled film. Continuous fMRI acoustic noise was presented during half of the blocks. The activity in six regions of interest was analyzed in 100-200 and 200-300 ms time windows to evaluate the magnetic counterparts of the mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a brain responses. The results suggested that fMRI noise significantly reduced the amplitude of these responses. The effect of the noise on the automatic processing of the tones was more prominent for the tones with frequencies higher than 500 Hz. It is recommended that in the MMN protocols using continuous fMRI acquisition the sound stimuli should be spectrally separated from the fMRI scanner noise spectrum.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2006

Selective tuning of cortical sound-feature processing by language experience.

In 'quantity-languages', such as Japanese or Finnish, sound duration is linguistically relevant. We showed that quantity-language speakers were superior to speakers of a non-quantity language in discriminating the duration of even non-speech sounds. In contrast, there was no group difference in the discrimination of sound frequency. This result, obtained both by behavioural and neural indices at attentive and automatic levels of processing, indicates precise feature-specific tuning of the auditory-cortex functions by the mother tongue.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2003

Auditory sensory memory disorder in dyslexic adults as indexed by the mismatch negativity.

Deficient temporal discrimination and vulnerability to masking effects caused by rapidly succeeding or simultaneous sounds might be one factor underlying the phonological difficulties in dyslexia. We evaluated cortical auditory discrimination in dyslexia by recording the mismatch negativity (MMN) for a simple pitch change, for an order reversal of tone pairs, and for tone-pair order reversals, with a third tone either preceding or following the tone pairs. It was found that when an additional tone followed the pairs the MMN amplitude was attenuated, suggesting elevated backward-masking effects in the auditory cortex of dyslexic individuals. In addition, the MMN elicited by pitch change was diminished over the left hemisphere of the dyslexic individuals suggesting left hemisphere auditory dysfunction. These results suggest impaired cortical discrimination of sounds and lowered tolerance for the masking effects of rapidly following sounds in dyslexia.

Adult↗

PubMed2001

Plastic neural changes and reading improvement caused by audiovisual training in reading-impaired children.

This study aimed at determining whether audiovisual training without linguistic material has a remediating effect on reading skills and central auditory processing in dyslexic children. It was found that this training resulted in plastic changes in the auditory cortex, indexed by enhanced electrophysiological mismatch negativity and faster reaction times to sound changes. Importantly, these changes were accompanied by improvement in reading skills. The results indicate that reading difficulties can be ameliorated by special training programs and, further, that the training effects can be observed in brain activity. Moreover, the fact that the present training effects were obtained by using a program including no linguistic material indicates that dyslexia is at least partly based on a general auditory perceptual deficit.

Audiovisual Aids↗

PubMed2001

Differentiating ERAN and MMN: an ERP study.

In the present study, the early right-anterior negativity (ERAN) elicited by harmonically inappropriate chords during listening to music was compared to the frequency mismatch negativity (MMN) and the abstract-feature MMN. Results revealed that the amplitude of the ERAN, in contrast to the MMN, is specifically dependent on the degree of harmonic appropriateness. Thus, the ERAN is correlated with the cognitive processing of complex rule-based information, i.e. with the application of music-syntactic rules. Moreover, results showed that the ERAN, compared to the abstract-feature MMN, had both a longer latency, and a larger amplitude. The combined findings indicate that ERAN and MMN reflect different mechanisms of pre-attentive irregularity detection, and that, although both components have several features in common, the ERAN does not easily fit into the classical MMN framework. The present ERPs thus provide evidence for a differentiation of cognitive processes underlying the fast and pre-attentive processing of auditory information.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2001

Fast vigilance decrement in closed head injury patients as reflected by the mismatch negativity (MMN).

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured from 24 chronic closed head injury (CHI) patients and 18 age- and education-matched controls. The oddball paradigm was applied while subjects were watching a silent movie. The standard (p=0.8) sound of 75 ms duration had a basic frequency of 500 Hz with harmonic partials of 1000 Hz and 1500 Hz, whereas these frequencies for the pitch deviant were each 10% higher. The frequencies of the duration deviant matched with those of the standard but was 25 ms in duration. The MMN (mismatch negativity), generated by the brain's automatic auditory change-detector mechanism, was elicited by both deviants. No significant differences in the MMN latency or amplitude for either pitch or duration deviants were found between the groups. However, the MMN amplitude for the pitch deviant decreased in the patient group during the experiment considerably faster than in controls, suggesting a faster vigilance decrement in the patients.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2001

"Primitive intelligence" in the auditory cortex.

The everyday auditory environment consists of multiple simultaneously active sources with overlapping temporal and spectral acoustic properties. Despite the seemingly chaotic composite signal impinging on our ears, the resulting perception is of an orderly "auditory scene" that is organized according to sources and auditory events, allowing us to select messages easily, recognize familiar sound patterns, and distinguish deviant or novel ones. Recent data suggest that these perceptual achievements are mainly based on processes of a cognitive nature ("sensory intelligence") in the auditory cortex. Even higher cognitive processes than previously thought, such as those that organize the auditory input, extract the common invariant patterns shared by a number of acoustically varying sounds, or anticipate the auditory events of the immediate future, occur at the level of sensory cortex (even when attention is not directed towards the sensory input).

Auditory Cortex↗

PubMed2001

Automatic discriminative sensitivity inside temporal window of sensory memory as a function of time.

Neural representation of preceding sound-patterns stored in the human brain, as reflected by mismatch negativity (MMN) related to the automatic discriminative process, is restricted to a duration of 160-170 ms due to the short form of auditory sensory memory termed the temporal window of integration (TWI). To examine the temporal uniformity of deviation-sensitivity inside TWI of sensory memory, magnetic MMN (MMNm) responses were measured with a dual 37-channel magnetometer for complex sounds of 170 ms duration containing an omitted (silent) segment. Frequent standard stimuli (probability of 80%) consisted of five tone segments. Deviant stimuli were different from standard stimuli in that one of four segments was occasionally (probability of 5%) omitted and replaced by a silent segment. The stimulus duration of 170 ms was intended to correspond to the postulated duration of TWI. When the silent segment occurred later in deviant stimulus, the MMNm peak amplitude was attenuated and MMNm peak latency, measured from the onset of each silent segment, was delayed. Thus, automatic deviation-detection sensitivity declines nonlinearly toward the end of TWI in auditory sensory memory. In the second experiment, two types of deviant stimuli, which differed from each other only in the period after the occurrence of the silent segment, elicited MMNm with the same peak latency but with a different peak amplitude. Thus, mismatch process is triggered at the moment of change but still lasts after the detection of deviation. In other words, both standard and deviant stimuli are treated as a unitary event within a TWI.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2001

Are different kinds of acoustic features processed differently for speech and non-speech sounds?

This study examined how changes in different types of acoustic features are processed in the brain for both speech and non-speech sounds. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in native Finnish speakers presented with sequences of repetitive vowels (/e/) or complex harmonical tones interspersed with infrequent changes in duration, frequency and either a vowel change (/o/ for vowel sequences) or a double deviant (frequency+duration change for tone sequences). The stimuli were presented monaurally in separate blocks to either the left or right ear. The results showed that speech stimuli were more efficiently processed than harmonical tones as reflected by an enhanced mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a ERP components. In addition, the duration change in vowels elicited a larger MMN component than the equivalent change in tones. This result might reflect enhanced processing of duration features in the Finnish language in which phoneme duration plays a critical role.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2001

The mismatch negativity as an index of temporal processing in audition.

OBJECTIVES: The relation of the mismatch negativity (MMN) elicitation with behavioral stimulus discrimination as well as the replicability of the MMN was evaluated for intervals between paired tones. METHODS: The MMN, obtained in a passive oddball paradigm in two sessions separated by 4-21 days and behavioral responses (button presses to target stimuli) in a separate session were recorded from 10 adult healthy subjects. The standard stimulus (P=0.79) was a tone pair separated by a 120 ms silent inter-stimulus interval (ISI) and the deviant stimuli were tone pairs with an ISI of 100, 60, and 20 ms (P=0.07 for each). RESULTS: The 20 and 60 ms ISI deviant tone pairs elicited a significant MMN during both recording sessions and they were also behaviorally discriminated, whereas neither did the 100 ms ISI deviant pair elicit significant MMN nor was it behaviorally discriminated. Furthermore, there was a significant correlation between the MMN and reaction times to the 20 and 60 ms ISI deviant pairs. The 20 ms ISI deviant stimulus elicited highly replicable MMNs (r=0.75), whereas the less well discriminated 60 ms ISI deviant pair did not (r=0.60). CONCLUSIONS: The MMN reflects discrimination accuracy of temporal sound intervals. Furthermore, when the physical difference between the standard and deviant tone pair in the temporal domain is large, it is elicited with high reliability.

Adult↗

PubMed2001

Musical sound processing in the human brain. Evidence from electric and magnetic recordings.

Recently, our knowledge regarding the brain's ability to represent invariant features of musical information even during the performance of a simultaneous task (unrelated to the sounds) has accumulated rapidly. Recordings of the change-specific mismatch negativity component of event-related brain potentials have shown that temporally and spectrally complex sounds as well as their relations are automatically processed by human auditory cortex. Furthermore, recent magnetoencephalographic and positron emission topographic investigations indicate that this processing differs between phonetic and musical sounds within and between the cerebral hemispheres. These data thus suggest that despite the focus of listeners' conscious attention, relatively complex sound phenomena can be encoded by neural mechanisms that are specialized for musical sounds.

Auditory Perception↗

PubMed2001

The processing of sound duration after left hemisphere stroke: event-related potential and behavioral evidence.

The ability of left-hemisphere stroke patients (n = 8) and healthy control subjects (n = 8) to process sounds preattentively and attentively was studied by recording auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral responses. For the right-ear stimulation, the mismatch negativity (MMN) was significantly smaller in the patients than control subjects over both hemispheres. For the left-ear stimuli, the MMN was significantly smaller in the patient group than in the control group over the left hemisphere, whereas no group differences were obtained over the right hemisphere. In addition, the N1 amplitude was reduced bilaterally for the right-ear stimulation (with the reduction being larger over the left hemisphere), whereas no significant effects on the N1 amplitude were found for the left-ear stimulation. Behaviorally, the patients detected significantly fewer deviant tones than did the control subjects irrespective of the stimulated ear. The present results thus suggest that the long-latency ERPs can be used to probe such auditory processing deficits that are difficult to define with behavioral measures. Especially by recording MMN to monaural stimuli, the discrimination accuracy can be separately determined for the left and right temporal lobes.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2000

Effects of spectral complexity and sound duration on automatic complex-sound pitch processing in humans - a mismatch negativity study.

The pitch of a spectrally rich sound is known to be more easily perceived than that of a sinusoidal tone. The present study compared the importance of spectral complexity and sound duration in facilitated pitch discrimination. The mismatch negativity (MMN), which reflects automatic neural discrimination, was recorded to a 2. 5% pitch change in pure tones with only one sinusoidal frequency component (500 Hz) and in spectrally rich tones with three (500-1500 Hz) and five (500-2500 Hz) harmonic partials. During the recordings, subjects concentrated on watching a silent movie. In separate blocks, stimuli were of 100 and 250 ms in duration. The MMN amplitude was enhanced with both spectrally rich sounds when compared with pure tones. The prolonged sound duration did not significantly enhance the MMN. This suggests that increased spectral rather than temporal information facilitates pitch processing of spectrally rich sounds.

Adult↗

PubMed2000

Harmonic partials facilitate pitch discrimination in humans: electrophysiological and behavioral evidence.

The effect of the spectral tone structure on pre-attentive and attentive pitch discrimination was investigated. The mismatch negativity (MMN) component was recorded from reading subjects to pitch changes of identical magnitude in pure tones with only one sinusoidal frequency component and in spectrally rich tones with two additional harmonic partials. In a separate condition, subjects were asked to indicate detection of pitch change by a button press. The MMN was elicited with a larger amplitude and shorter latency by change in spectrally rich tones than by change in pure tones. Furthermore, the subjects' behavioral responses were more accurate for spectrally rich tones than for sinusoidal tones. Together these data indicate that pre-attentive and attentive pitch discrimination is facilitated with spectrally rich sounds in comparison to pure sinusoidal tones.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2000

Basic auditory dysfunction in dyslexia as demonstrated by brain activity measurements.

Although the generality of dyslexia and its devastating effects on the individual's life are widely acknowledged, its precursors and associated neural mechanisms are poorly understood. One of the two major competing views maintains that dyslexia is based primarily on a deficit in linguistic processing, whereas the other view suggests a more general processing deficit, one involving the perception of temporal information. Here we present evidence in favor of the latter view by showing that the neural discrimination of temporal information within complex tone patterns fails in dyslexic adults. This failure can be traced to early cortical mechanisms that process auditory information independently of attention.

Adult↗

PubMed2000

Lateralized automatic auditory processing of phonetic versus musical information: a PET study.

Previous positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies show that during attentive listening, processing of phonetic information is associated with higher activity in the left auditory cortex than in the right auditory cortex while the opposite is true for musical information. The present PET study determined whether automatically activated neural mechanisms for phonetic and musical information are lateralized. To this end, subjects engaged in a visual word classification task were presented with phonetic sound sequences consisting of frequent (P = 0.8) and infrequent (P = 0.2) phonemes and with musical sound sequences consisting of frequent (P = 0.8) and infrequent (P = 0.2) chords. The phonemes and chords were matched in spectral complexity as well as in the magnitude of frequency difference between the frequent and infrequent sounds (/e/ vs. /o/; A major vs. A minor). In addition, control sequences, consisting of either frequent (/e/; A major) or infrequent sounds (/o/; A minor) were employed in separate blocks. When sound sequences consisted of intermixed frequent and infrequent sounds, automatic phonetic processing was lateralized to the left hemisphere and musical to the right hemisphere. This lateralization, however, did not occur in control blocks with one type of sound (frequent or infrequent). The data thus indicate that automatic activation of lateralized neuronal circuits requires sound comparison based on short-term sound representations.

Adult↗

PubMed1999

Superior pre-attentive auditory processing in musicians.

The present study focuses on influences of long-term experience on auditory processing, providing the first evidence for pre-attentively superior auditory processing in musicians. This was revealed by the brain's automatic change-detection response, which is reflected electrically as the mismatch negativity (MMN) and generated by the operation of sensoric (echoic) memory, the earliest cognitive memory system. Major chords and single tones were presented to both professional violinists and non-musicians under ignore and attend conditions. Slightly impure chords, presented among perfect major chords elicited a distinct MMN in professional musicians, but not in non-musicians. This demonstrates that compared to non-musicians, musicians are superior in pre-attentively extracting more information out of musically relevant stimuli. Since effects of long-term experience on pre-attentive auditory processing have so far been reported for language-specific phonemes only, results indicate that sensory memory mechanisms can be modulated by training on a more general level.

Acoustic Stimulation↗