Browsing by Author "Laamanen, Petra"

There are relatively few studies on pre-attentive auditory processing in middle-aged people. However, previous studies have shown that aging affects the ability to detect changes in regular auditory input at pre-attentive level as well as to involuntary allocation of attention. Recording of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) provides a good way for examining these phenomena. One purpose of this study was to find out whether musical expertise effects pre-attentive auditory processing in this particular age group. Results of many experiments have shown that children and young adults with musical expertise are more sensitive to acoustic properties of musical and phonemic sounds. There is also some evidence that adult musicians detect deviant pure tones more accurately than non-musicians. Based on this, we hypothesized that musicians would discriminate deviant tones in this study more accurately as well. Second aim of this study was to find out whether multi-feature paradigm can be used to examine pre-attentive auditory processing in middle-aged participants. In previous studies with young adults the multi-feature paradigm has proven to be a suitable way to study short-term memory and attention allocation. The 24 participants were derived into two groups based on their level of musical expertise. Participants in music group practiced music regularly and participants in non-music group had some other free time activities. We used a multi-feature paradigm that consisted of pure tone sound sequence in which four types of acoustic changes (frequency, duration, intensity and perceived sound-source location) varied in every other tone in three deviation magnitude (small, medium and large). Based on previous studies we assumed that these deviant tones would elicit both mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a components, which are thought to reflect automatic, pre-attentive auditory processing. The magnitude of deviation was presumed to reflect in MMN and P3a amplitudes. In this study, no between-group differences were found for MMN or P3a amplitudes. However, MMN distributions slightly differed both frontally and laterally in these two groups. This finding might indicate that musical expertise has an influence on which parts of the brain auditory input is processed. As expected, deviant tones of small, medium and large magnitude elicited MMN components and medium and large deviations elicited also P3a components. As a rule, the amplitude of components increased with the magnitude of deviance. These results are in line with previous studies and show that the multi-feature paradigm can be used to examine pre-attentive auditory processing in middle-aged as in younger adults.