Anwendbarkeit ereigniskorrelierter potenziale (EKP) zur untersuchung selektiver auditiver aufmerksamkeit nach cochlea-implantat-versorgung

Background: Cochlea-implant (CI) users suffer from degraded recognition performance in noisy environments when one has to separate the signal from the noise. Thus, mechanisms of auditory selective attention seem to be impaired in CI patients. It is unknown to what extend auditory attention can be employed from the very first days after the initial CI processor calibration. Event-related potentials (ERPs), a non-invasive EEC-based technique, have recently been adopted to trace non-attentive stimulus detection and attentive stimulus discrimination in Cl users. Method: 7 days after the initial processor calibration we recorded attention-modulated (Nd, N2b, P3b) and non-attentive (mismatch negativity - MMN) ERPs when 7 postlingually deafened patients performed auditory and visual discrimination tasks. Results: For visual and auditory tasks ERPs were modulated by attention, thus indicating preserved attentive processing in the auditory modality even within a very short period after first processor calibration. When rare deviant stimuli were presented in an unattended tone sequence, the MMN indicated automatic stimulus detection of the acoustic environment in Cl users. Conclusions: From the first days after cochlear-implantation, both pre-attentive and attentive stimulus processing are initiated to gain the incoming acoustic signal.