ABSTRACT
In processing stimuli from the outside world, humans are faced with several tasks: (1) They have to select those aspects of the environment that contain important information, while discarding other, less interesting aspects, (2) they have to be able to monitor the entire environment for potentially meaningful stimuli, and (3) they have to do this within milliseconds. The filter process implied in the first task is usually captured by the term selective attention, while the global surveillance required by the second task is believed to occur without selective attention, that is, preattentively. Because of the enormous temporal constraints for these selection and detection processes, methods with high temporal resolution are required. Such resolution is provided by the event-related brain potential (ERP) technique. ERPs are small voltage fluctuations that occur in response to stimuli or other events and can be extracted from the ongoing EEG by a simple averaging procedure. Importantly, it has been demonstrated that portions of the ERP vary systematically as a function of perceptual and cognitive processes (Münte et al., 2000a). They show exquisite sensitivity towards task manipulations. In this chapter we will provide a brief review of the basic ERP indexes of attentive and preattentive auditory selection. We will also discuss some studies related to auditory processing in professional musicians.
