harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) (12/14/88)
Below is the abstract of a forthcoming target article to appear in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international,
interdisciplinary journal that provides Open Peer Commentary on important
and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive
sciences. Commentators must be current BBS Associates or nominated by a
current BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator on this article,
to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how
to become a BBS Associate, please send email to:
harnad@confidence.princeton.edu or write to:
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THE ROLE OF ATTENTION IN AUDITORY INFORMATION PROCESSING
AS REVEALED BY EVENT-RELATED POTENTIALS
Risto Naatanen
Department of Psychology
University of Helsinki
Helsinki, Finland
This target article examines the roles of attention and automaticity in
auditory processing as revealed by event-related potential (ERP)
research. An ERP component called the "mismatch negativity" indicates
that physical and temporal features of auditory stimuli are fully
processed whether or not they are attended. It also suggests that there
exists a mechanism of passive attention switching with changes in
repetitive input. ERPs also reveal some of the cerebral mechanisms by
which acoustic stimulus events produce and control conscious
perception. The "processing negativity" component implicates a
mechanism for attending selectively to stimuli defined by certain
physical features. Stimulus selection occurs in the form of a matching
process in which each input is compared to the "attentional trace," a
voluntarily maintained representation of the task-relevant features of
the stimulus to be attended.
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