The Effects of Auditory Short-Term Training in Passive Oddball Paradigm with Novel Stimuli

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to determine how human neural activity might be changed through auditory short-term training when listening to novel stimuli. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Among the twenty young normal hearing adult listeners who participated, ten were randomly assigned to a training group and ten were assigned to a non-training group as a control. Two synthesized novel stimuli were used: /su/ and /∫u/. Both stimuli similarly sounded like /su/, but had two different onset transition frequencies and fricative pole frequencies. In the experiment, behavioral identification test (i.e., /su/ vs. /∫u/) and the mismatch negativity (MMN) were measured before and after training for the training group. To gauge the training effect, the listeners in the training group were taught by discrimination and identification of two novel stimuli for about 20 minutes. RESULTS: The results showed that scores for the behavioral test increased significantly after auditory short-term training. Also, onset latency, duration, and area of the MMN were significantly changed when elicited by the training stimuli. CONCLUSIONS: These findings indicated that auditory short-term training could change human neural activity, suggesting future clinical applications for auditory training.