Opposite effects of rapid auditory stimulation on tetanized and non-tetanized tone of adjacent frequency: Mismatch negativity study.

Our study describes the effects of sensory tetanization on neurophysiological and behavioral measures in humans linking cellular studies of long-term potentiation with high-level brain processes. Rapid (every 75ms) presentation of pure tone (1020 Hz, 50ms) for 2 minutes was preceded and followed by oddball blocks that contained the same stimulus presented as deviant (probability of 5-10%) interspersed with standard (80-90%) and deviant tones (5-10%) of adjacent frequencies (1000 and 980Hz, respectively). Mismatch negativity (MMN) component in response to tetanized tone (1020Hz), while being similar to MMN for non-tetanized tone before tetanization, became larger than that after tetanization, pointing to the increase in cortical differentiation of these tones. However, this differentiation was partially due to the MMN decrease after tetanization for tones adjacent to tetanized frequency, suggesting the influence of lateral inhibition to this effect. Although MMN correlated with tone discriminability in a psychophysical task, the behavioral improvement after tetanization was not statistically detectable. To conclude, short-term auditory tetanization affects cortical representation of tones that are not limited to the tetanized stimuli.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2023 Kostanian et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)