The Mismatch Negativity 30 Years Later: How Far Have We Come?

Mismatch negativity (MMN) is an event-related brain response (ERP) elicited by auditory events breaking the expectancy created by the regularity of the preceding sequence of auditory stimulation. The phenomenon was first described about 30 years ago by Naatanen and colleagues (Naatanen, Gaillard, & Mantysalo, 1978) as the negative potential emerging in the EEG recordings to a tone burst that deviated in frequency (or intensity) from, and compared to the potential recorded to, the predominantly “standard” frequency (or intensity) of most of the tones. Over these 30 years, more than 1000 papers have been published in various scientific journals on this specific event-related brain response. The study topics involving the MMN have considerably evolved since its origins. Originally, a systematic investigation was undertaken to establish its antecedent conditions, i.e., the type of auditory stimulus features that were able to elicit such an ERP response (Sams, Paavilainen, Alho, & Naatanen, 1985; Paavilainen, Karlsson, Reinikainen, & Naatanen, 1989; Paavilainen, Alho, Reinikainen, Sams, & Naatanen, 1991). Also early research focused on the nature of the underlying generating process, i.e., endogenous (cognitive) or relation to refractoriness (Naatanen, Paavilainen, Alho, Reinikainen, & Sams, 1989; Naatanen, Paavilainen, & Reinikainen, 1989), or in its relationship to auditory perception (Tiitinen, May, Reinikainen, & Naatanen, 1994; Amenedo & Escera, 2000). Almost in parallel, a set of studies aimed at locating the MMN’s neural generators within the auditory cortex (Hari et al., 1984; Csepe, Karmos, & Molnar, 1987; Alho, 1995) and identified further contributions from prefrontal regions (Giard, Perrin, Pernier, & Bouchet, 1990). A solid theoretical framework was subsequently formulated to integrate all the MMN findings (Naatanen, 1990, 1992; Naatanen & Winkler, 1999; Schroger, 1997). At this point, the MMN was in a solid position to take two new avenues of research. On the one hand, the MMN was used in a number of clinical populations, where, starting from the first studies addressing schizophrenia (Shelley, Ward, Catts, Michie, Andrews, & McConaghy, 1991), Alzheimer’s disease (Pekkonen, Jousmaki, Kononen, Reinikainen, & Partanen, 1994), or comatose patients (Kane, Curry, Butler, & Cummins, 1993; Fischer, Morlet, Bouchet, Luaute, Jourdan, & Salord, 1999), it more recently was able to show specific auditory processing impairments in dyslexia (Baldeweg, Richardson, Watkins, Foale, & Gruzelier, 1999) or the involvement of defective speech sound representation in developmental stuttering (Corbera, Corral, Escera, & Idiazabal, 2005). In part, these studies were possible thanks to methodological improvements (i.e., Ponton, Don, Eggermont, & Kwong, 1997; Sinkkonen & Tervaniemi, 2000) and the establishment of MMN reliability (Escera & Grau, 1996; Escera, Yago, Polo, & Grau, 2000; Pekkonen, Rinne, & Naatanen, 1995; Tervaniemi, Lehtokoski, Sinkkonen, Virtanen, Ilmoniemi, & Naatanen, 1999; Uwer & Suchodoletz, 2000). On the other hand, the MMN jumped into cognitive neuroscience and became a valuable tool for solving problems related to how the brain supports cognitive activities and subserves memory representations. Just a few examples: the relationship of MMN to sensory and long-term memory (Winkler, Cowan, Csepe, Czigler, & Naatanen, 1996), to involuntary attention (Schroger, 1996; Escera, Alho, Winkler, & Naatanen, 1998), to its ability to show how speech sounds are represented in the left auditory cortex (Naatanen et al., 1997), in larger cerebral networks encompassing their functional meaning (Shtyrov, Hauk, & Pulvermuller, 2004), or to the use of the MMN as a tool for studying auditory scene analysis processes, e.g., as an index of sound organization in auditory memory (Sussman, Ritter, & Vaughan, 1998, 1999). These achievements, together with the early MMN studies, have been reviewed extensively throughout the years, most recently in Kujala, Tervaniemi, and Schroger (2007) and Naatanen, Paavilainen, Rinne, and Alho (2007). To honor MMN as an emerging tool in cognitive and clinical neuroscience, a first international conference on © 2007 Federation of European Psychophysiology Societies