The effect of attention on the auditory steady-state response.

40-Hz auditory steady state responses to amplitude modulated tones were recorded with magnetoencephalography to investigate the effect of focused attention. A modulation discrimination task and a destructive visual task established the attended and the non-attended experimental conditions. A strong contrast between these conditions was demonstrated by largely enhanced sustained responses under the attention condition. A significant attentional effect on the ASSR amplitude was observed mostly in the left hemisphere between 200 to 500 ms after stimulus onset. In contrast, transient gamma-band and N1 responses were not affected by the different states of attention.

[1]  T. Picton,et al.  Human auditory sustained potentials. I. The nature of the response. , 1978, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[2]  T W Picton,et al.  Human auditory steady-state evoked potentials during selective attention. , 1987, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[3]  R. Näätänen,et al.  The transient 40-Hz response, mismatch negativity, and attentional processes in humans , 1997, Progress in Neuro-psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry.

[4]  C Pantev,et al.  A high-precision magnetoencephalographic study of human auditory steady-state responses to amplitude-modulated tones. , 2000, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[5]  R. Zatorre,et al.  Spectral and temporal processing in human auditory cortex. , 2001, Cerebral cortex.

[6]  Daniel Gembris,et al.  Top-down attentional processing enhances auditory evoked gamma band activity , 2003, Neuroreport.

[7]  P. Fries,et al.  Is synchronized neuronal gamma activity relevant for selective attention? , 2003, Brain Research Reviews.

[8]  M. Scherg,et al.  Intracerebral Sources of Human Auditory Steady-State Responses , 2004, Brain Topography.