Auditory imagery mismatch negativity elicited in musicians.

A mismatch between auditory sensation and expectant imagery of syllables elicited a possible equivalent of mismatch negativity in a previous study. The purpose of this study was to verify whether auditory imagery from musical notation could also mediate such imagery-based mismatch negativity. Neuromagnetic recording was obtained from eight musicians, who were instructed to identify unpredictably occurring pitch mismatches between a random tone sequence and a visually presented musical score. The difference between incongruent and congruent responses showed a magnetic distribution consistent with two frontal-negative current dipoles bilaterally located in the vicinity of Heschl's gyrus, peaking at approximately 150 ms in latency. This imagery-based mismatch negativity may represent an early neural process of deviance detection between the sensory input and expectant imagery.