Auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) is an electrophysiological response to a deviation from regularity. This response is considered pivotal to understanding auditory processing, particularly in the pre-attentive phase. However, previous findings suggest that MMN is a product of N1 adaptation/enhancement, which reflects lower-order auditory processing. The separability of these two components remains unclear and is considered an important issue in the field of neuroscience. The aim of the present study was to spatiotemporally differentiate MMN from N1 adaptation using human electrocorticography (ECoG). Auditory evoked potentials under the classical oddball (OD) task as well as the many standards (MS) task were recorded in three patients with epilepsy whose lateral cortices were widely covered with high-density electrodes. Close observation identified an electrode at which N1 adaptation was temporally separated from MMN, whereas N1 adaptation was partially incorporated into MMN at other electrodes. Since N1 adaptation occurs in the N1 population, we spatially compared MMN with N1 obtained from the MS task instead of N1 adaptation. As a result, N1 was observed in a limited area around the Sylvian fissure adjacent to A1, whereas MMN was noted in wider areas, including the temporal, frontal, and parietal lobes. MMN was thus considered to be differentiated from N1 adaptation. The results suggest that MMN is not merely a product of the neural adaptation of N1 and instead represents higher-order processes in auditory deviance detection. These results will contribute to strengthening the foundation of future research in this field.
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