The N1 auditory ERP and its magnetic counterpart (N1[m]) are suppressed when elicited by self-induced sounds. Because the N1(m) is a correlate of auditory event detection, this N1 suppression effect is generally interpreted as a reflection of the workings of an internal forward model: The forward model captures the contingency (causal relationship) between the action and the sound, and this is used to cancel the predictable sensory reafference when the action is initiated. In this study, we demonstrated in three experiments using a novel coincidence paradigm that actual contingency between actions and sounds is not a necessary condition for N1 suppression. Participants performed time interval production tasks: They pressed a key to set the boundaries of time intervals. Concurrently, but independently of keypresses, a sequence of pure tones with random onset-to-onset intervals was presented. Tones coinciding with keypresses elicited suppressed N1(m) and P2(m), suggesting that action–stimulus contiguity (temporal proximity) is sufficient to suppress sensory processing related to the detection of auditory events.

The effects of familiarity on auditory change detection on the basis of auditory sensory memory representations were investigated by presenting oddball sequences of sounds while participants ignored the auditory stimuli. Stimulus sequences were composed of sounds that were familiar and sounds that were made unfamiliar by playing the same sounds backward. The roles of frequently presented stimuli (standards) and infrequently presented ones (deviants) were fully crossed. Deviants elicited the mismatch negativity component of the event-related brain potential. We found an enhancement in detecting changes when deviant sounds appeared among familiar standard sounds compared when they were delivered among unfamiliar standards. Familiarity with the deviant sounds also enhanced the change-detection process. We suggest that tuning to familiar items sets up preparatory processes that affect change detection in familiar sound sequences.

We investigated the role of attention in feature binding in the auditory and the visual modality. One auditory and one visual experiment used the mismatch negativity (MMN and vMMN, respectively) event-related potential to index the memory representations created from stimulus sequences, which were either task-relevant and, therefore, attended or task-irrelevant and ignored. In the latter case, the primary task was a continuous demanding within-modality task. The test sequences were composed of two frequently occurring stimuli, which differed from each other in two stimulus features (standard stimuli) and two infrequently occurring stimuli (deviants), which combined one feature from one standard stimulus with the other feature of the other standard stimulus. Deviant stimuli elicited MMN responses of similar parameters across the different attentional conditions. These results suggest that the memory representations involved in the MMN deviance detection response encoded the frequently occurring feature combinations whether or not the test sequences were attended. A possible alternative to the memory-based interpretation of the visual results, the elicitation of the McCollough color-contingent aftereffect, was ruled out by the results of our third experiment. The current results are compared with those supporting the attentive feature integration theory. We conclude that (1) with comparable stimulus paradigms, similar results have been obtained in the two modalities, (2) there exist preattentive processes of feature binding, however, (3) conjoining features within rich arrays of objects under time pressure and/or long-term retention of the feature-conjoined memory representations may require attentive processes.