Selective attention toward the deviant events resulted in enhanced MMFs particularly within the left hemisphere, indicating attention-dependent left-lateralized processing of dynamic auditory events across both the speech and non-speech domains.
The MMN is the negative component of a difference wave between responses to standard and deviant events embedded in an oddball paradigm.
In this fMRI variant of mismatch negativity [ 14, 15], participants were presented with deviant events (emotions and gender neutral prosody) embedded in a stream of standard sounds (female voice with neutral prosody), while they were watching a silent movie [ 16].
Using typical oddball paradigms, two early studies found that, when stimulus omissions are employed as the deviant events, an MMN is also elicited (Nordby et al., 1994; Tervaniemi et al., 1994).
If the deviant, or the new event, occurs while this memory trace is still active, the automatic change-detection is activated, giving rise to a MMN response (Näätänen, 2000).
As the journalism professor Pamela Shoemaker observes, news audiences everywhere have an innate interest in "people, ideas, or events that are deviant (either positive or negative)." Good journalists are mindful that they amplify "deviance" even while they subject it scrutiny.
In our aforementioned EEG-ANS study (Wessel et al. 2010) we interpret our results in the light of recent behavioral experiments (Notebaert et al. 2009), which suggested strong behavioral parallels between processing of errors and other rare, potentially significant events (e.g., deviant and/or novel stimuli).
She's convinced she's some sort of pervert or deviant, and reaches breaking point at a family event, when she imagines snogging her own mother.
A good example of this notion is given by the mismatch negativity (MMN), the difference between the event-related potential to an unexpected "deviant" and predictable "standard" stimuli (Naatanen et al. 2001).
