Auditory event-related potentials

Auditory event related potentials are electric potentials (AERP, AEP) and magnetic fields (AEF) generated by the synchronous activity of large neural populations in the brain, which are time-locked to some actual or expected sound event

Seeing speech affects acoustic information processing in the human brainstem

Afferent auditory processing in the human brainstem is generally assumed to be determined by acoustic stimulus features and immune to stimulation by other senses or cognitive factors. In contrast, we show that lipreading during speech perception influences acoustic processing astonishingly early. Event-related brainstem potentials were recorded from 10 healthy adults to concordant (acoustic-visual match), conflicting (acoustic-visual mismatch) and unimodal stimuli. Audiovisual interactions occurred around 11ms post-stimulation and persisted for the first 30ms of the response. Furthermore, response timing and magnitude depended on audiovisual pairings. These findings indicate that early auditory processing is more plastic than previously thought