Mismatch negativity: Clinical and other applications

The perspectives of application of the mismatch negativity (MMN), generated by the brain's automatic response to change in auditory stimulation, are d iscussed. In light of the fact that the MMN (and its magnetic equivalent MM Nm) currently provides the only objective measure of the accuracy of the ce ntral auditory function, these perspectives appear very promising. The MMN can be measured in the absence of attention and task requirements, which ma kes it particularly suitable for testing different clinical populations and infants. Furthermore, the MMN enables one to evaluate the accuracy of audi tory discrimination separately for any acoustic feature, such as frequency, intensity and duration, and for learned categories, such as the phonemes o f a particular language. In addition, by measuring the decay of the MMN amp litude as a function of the interstimulus interval, it is possible to estim ate the duration of sensory (echoic) memory. Copyright(C) 2000 S. Karger AG , Basel.