EVENT-RELATED POTENTIALS REVEAL A MEMORY TRACE FOR TEMPORAL FEATURES

AUDITORY event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from reading su bjects while they were presented with 50 ms tone pips intervened by re gular silent intervals of 550 ms. This interval was occasionally short ened either to 250, 100, 25, 10, or 2 ms, which resulted in the elicit ation of the mismatch-negativity (MMN), a change-specific ERP componen t not elicited by tones appearing after the regular, longer intervals. This indicates that the MMN is not just due to new afferent elements activated by deviant but not standard stimuli. In addition, the presen t results suggest that the temporal parameters of acoustic stimulation are also encoded in memory traces which therefore are representations of auditory events rather than only of static stimulus aspects.