Biological sex as a mediating factor of the auditory mismatch negativity

Abstract

The mismatch negativity (MMN) is an EEG-derived event-related potential (ERP) elicited by any violation of a predicted auditory ‘rule’ and is thought to reflect updating of the stimulus context. In MMN research, sex differences have been largely underreported; the few studies that report sex-based analyses have largely focused on phonetic sounds with emotional valence, while pure-tone stimuli have not yielded any significant results. This study investigated whether sex differences could be detected in a healthy population using a 5-deviant “optimal” multi-feature paradigm (Näätanen, 2004; Experiment 1) and a complex ‘missing stimulus’ pattern paradigm (Salisbury, 2012; Experiment 2). The only significant difference observed was that males were found to have enhanced left-frontal MMN amplitudes compared to females when presented with the location deviant of the optimal paradigm. These results suggest that the auditory MMN may be more characterized by sex similarities.