Auditory Habituation and Evoked Potentials in a Learning Response

Abstract

In humans event-related potentials (ERP) are correlated with psychological processes, underlying language and learning. The slow wave components of the ERP with latencies greater than 50 ms appear to be most closely correlated with these processes. Stuss et al. (1983) have shown that a slow negative wave with a peak latency of 250–500 ms appears when subjects require semantic processing of visual stimuli. Our earlier study (Linke et al. 1980) showed that after semantic auditory stimuli, which are the auditory counterpart of the above visual stimuli, there is a slow negative wave with a peak latency of 350–700 ms. In this paper we term this slow response, the semantic negative (SN). We have observed that at the first presentation of a stimulus (in our experiments the presentation of a foreign word) there is no obvious SN, but upon repetition of the stimulus during the course of an experiment the SN becomes more distinct. Psychological habituation associates a semantic image in the memory with the stimulus, resulting in the SN. This may also be the case for learning a foreign word.