Human auditory-cortex mechanisms of preattentive sound discrimination

Intracranial event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in neurological patients to infrequent higher-pitch ‘deviant’ tones and to frequent ‘standard’ tones when they occurred, in random order in a mixed sequence of standard and deviant tones and when they occurred in separate sequences, that is, infrequent tones alone with intervals similar to inter-deviant intervals of the mixed sequence and frequent tones alone with intervals similar to those between the standard tones of the mixed sequence. When the tones were ignored, ERPs showed three types of responses revealing three different processes involved in stimulus discrimination in the superior temporal cortex: (1) a pitch-dependent response in the primary auditory cortex; (2) an interstimulus-interval dependent response in the secondary auditory cortex; and (3) a change-detection (‘mismatch’) response in the auditory association cortex. When the tones were attended, ERPs to deviant and standard tones showed differences also in the basal ganglia-thalamic circuits and in the hippocampus, indicating their involvement in attentive processing of auditory stimulus changes.