Minna Huotilainen

..The correlation was higher in the posterior scalp areas. Our results suggest that the involuntary attention switching system, reflected by the P3a is sensitized as a function of decreased sleep quality...

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..We investigated whether newborns respond differently to novel and deviant sounds during quiet sleep...

..Studying each of these auditory skills with MEG in particular stimulation paradigms is shortly reviewed, including two examples of data sets in children...

..To address this question, we investigated early neurophysiological phoneme discrimination abilities and later language skills in prematurely born infants and in healthy, full-term infants...

..The modelling of the neural sources underlying the recorded responses suggests cortical sources in the temporal lobes...

..The main advantage of ERFs, compared to ERPs, is detection of the signals with high accuracy both with respect to the noise level and estimation of the spatial location...

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..Thus, this new multi-feature paradigm with speech stimuli provides similar results as the oddball paradigm, and the MMNs recorded with the new paradigm were reproducible...

..Similar MMNs in the two paradigms would suggest that they tap the same processes. This would promote the usefulness of the more time-efficient multi-feature paradigm for future studies in children...

..These data are interpreted in terms of an attentional switching to unfamiliar changes that participants would not expect among the signals that they would grow to anticipate while receiving Morse code...

..However, it should be noted that the present study only had sufficient statistical power to detect a large effect size...

..Behavioral experiments show that infants use both prosodic and statistical cues in acquiring language. However, it is not yet clear whether these prosodic and statistical tools are already present at birth...

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..To test the statistical learning skills at birth, we recorded event-related brain responses of sleeping neonates while they were listening to a stream of syllables containing statistical cues to word boundaries...

..The precision of sound frequency discrimination in newborn infants in the 250-4000-Hz frequency range was determined using the neonatal electrophysiological mismatch response (MMR), the infant equivalent of adult mismatch negativity (MMN)...

..Our data further extend the notion of differential cortical representations in response to vowel categories, previously demonstrated by using only one or a few tokens representing each category...

..The mismatch negativity (MMN): towards the optimal paradigm. Clin Neurophysiol 2004;115:140-144]...

..The present results indicate that auditory-cortex speech-sound discrimination may well be studied with magnetic recordings as early as in newborn infants...

..Statistically significant responses from individual children were obtained mainly for the novel sounds. Thus, the MFP shows promise as a time-efficient paradigm for investigating central auditory functions in toddlers...

..The second-language users, however, did not seem to have automatic access to Finnish prototypes...

..28+/-0.59 microM) than in quiet sleep (0.76+/-0.32 microM). The latency of the oxygenated hemoglobin concentration response was significantly shorter (r=-0.70 and p=0.0023) for infants with higher gestational age...

..Our results show that assessing speech sound discrimination of several features in word context is possible in a short recording time (30 min) with the multifeature paradigm...

..This has been proposed to be one of the earliest symptoms to emerge, with pervasive effects on later development...

..In the present study, we found no conclusive evidence that acute exposure to GSM mobile phone EMF affects cortical auditory change detection processing reflected by the MMN...

..4:0), suggesting some ability of the human brain to operate on the number of sequential sounds of specific frequencies at a preperceptual time scale...

..The findings suggest very early sensitivity to auditory numerical information in infancy...

..These plastic changes manifest, presumably, the close associations formed between the neural representations of the tone patterns and phonemes...

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..Our finding suggests that the human brain is ready for auditory feature binding very soon after birth...

..The results demonstrate that temperament is related to P3a responses in early childhood, and that parent-child synchrony associates with both temperament and P3a responses in a theoretically meaningful way...

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..As one-fourth of the preterm children could not accomplish the paradigm, less demanding paradigms should be used in studying children with increased distractibility...

..This suggests that phoneme quality and quantity are processed by separate neural processes that, in a system model, may be regarded as different levels in the phonological system...

..These results implicate the presence of long-term memory traces for vowels, which can recognize the vowel-specific invariant code enabling correct vowel percept even in the presence of realistic acoustic variation...

..This finding suggests that humans are relatively hard-wired to preattentively identify repeated auditory feature conjunctions even when such conjunctions occur rarely among other similar ones...

..8). The harmonical tones elicited MMN and P3a with shorter latencies and larger amplitudes, than did pure sinusoidal tones in all frequency bands. The results may have implication to pitch-perception theories...

..However, for the sounds that have no Russian equivalent, new vowel categories independent of the native Russian language have apparently been established, enabling a native-like duration processing of Finnish...

..We studied the neurocognitive mechanisms of musical instrument sound perception in children with Cochlear Implants (CIs) and in children with normal hearing (NH)...

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..In the present study, we tested whether the MMN can be recorded even without the standard stimulus, with the invariant properties of the deviant stimuli serving as a standard against which to detect the sound changes...

..Differential scalp-recorded event-related potentials to deviants indicate that the standard variants were traced as repeated wholes despite their preperceptual distinctiveness and resulting rarity among one another...

..To study whether a dyslexia remediation programme, Audilex, improves cognition in extremely low birth (ELBW) children...

..In this study, we investigated learning-related changes in auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) of Finnish-speaking 3-6-year-old children caused by learning French language...

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..auditory event-related potentials (AERPs) can be used as indices of neural information processing. Altered AERPs have been reported in children and young adults with frontal lobe infarction...

..In a study of the same subjects at age 5, our aim was to assess AERPs and their relationship to neuropsychological test results...

..These results suggest that patients with schizophrenia have impaired auditory processing in the temporal lobes underlying preattentive stimulus discrimination that is also selectively delayed in the left hemisphere...

..In the current study we demonstrated, for the first time, that the central sound processing, as reflected by ERPs, is affected in children with plagiocephaly...

..It was also found that P3 amplitude and reaction time correlated only under the high memory load condition. The results indicate that visual P3 to a simple processing task is affected by external working memory load...

..The proposed method can be used to enhance EEG spectral analysis of task-induced cognitive effort during sleep deprivation...

..We present two brain research paradigms that can be used to assess the specialization of the brain for musical sounds, and show promising results with these paradigms in a group of young children who have music as their hobby...

..To some extent, musical expertise is also reflected in sound representation accuracy as indexed by the MMN paradigm...

..Results are discussed in terms of developmental refinement of the initially broadly tuned neonate auditory system...

..This finding suggests the early ontogenetic origin of 'primitive intelligence' in audition that eventually may form a prerequisite for later language acquisition...

..The results demonstrate a top-down effect on the sound representation maintained in auditory cortex...

..These results give support to the notions about the role of the amygdala and hippocampus in alerting and orienting, respectively, and of the temporal cortex in auditory discrimination...

..The investigation of sound discrimination and related cortical activity of the fetus can help to identify and determine the nature of deficits caused by central processes in the auditory system at very early stages...

..Also, for the first time, we observed oscillatory gamma-band activity in neonates, which was sensitive to infrequent pitch changes...

..Taken together, the results imply that musical and linguistic skills could partly be based on shared neural mechanisms...

..Its presence in newborn infants shows that the basic abilities required for the development of conceptual objects are available already at the time of birth...

..This article provides recommended standards for FMCG in the fields of data acquisition and data analysis...

..Further research will elucidate the possibility of developing AERPs as a possible early screening method during infancy for later dyslexia or cognitive dysfunction...