Attention effects on auditory evoked potentials to infrequent events.

In two experiments, evoked potentials (EPs) were obtained for three levels of attention, defined by instructions to press a button to, listen to or ignore an infrequent event. In experiment 1, a regular train of standard tone pips was occasionally and randomly interrupted by a tone of different pitch (pitch change) or by the omission of a tone (gap). At the vertex (Cz) a late positive peak (P3) to the infrequent event became larger and later with increased attention, while the earlier negative peak (N1) became later but not larger. In experiment 2, EPs to pitch changes were recorded from Cz, frontal (Fz) and parietal (Pz) locations. All effects obtained in experiment 1 were replicated. The distribution of P3 was different during the different attention conditions.