Evoked Potentials, Auditory
Research Papers
Neurofeedback-Based Enhancement of Single-Trial Auditory Evoked Potentials: Treatment of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in Schizophrenia
Auditory verbal hallucinations depend on a broad neurobiological network ranging from the auditory system to language as well as memory-related processes. As part of this, the auditory N100 event-related potential (ERP) component is attenuated in patients with schizophrenia, with stronger attenuation occurring during auditory verbal hallucinations. Changes in the N100 component assumingly reflect disturbed responsiveness of the auditory system toward external stimuli in schizophrenia. With this premise, we investigated the therapeutic utility of neurofeedback training to modulate the auditory-evoked N100 component in patients with schizophrenia and associated auditory verbal hallucinations. Ten patients completed electroencephalography neurofeedback training for modulation of N100 (treatment condition) or another unrelated component, P200 (control condition). On a behavioral level, only the control group showed a tendency for symptom improvement in the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale total score in a pre-/postcomparison ( t(4) = 2.71, P = .054); however, no significant differences were found in specific hallucination related symptoms ( t(7) = -0.53, P = .62). There was no significant overall effect of neurofeedback training on ERP components in our paradigm; however, we were able to identify different learning patterns, and found a correlation between learning and improvement in auditory verbal hallucination symptoms across training sessions ( r = 0.664, n = 9, P = .05). This effect results, with cautious interpretation due to the small sample size, primarily from the treatment group ( r = 0.97, n = 4, P = .03). In particular, a within-session learning parameter showed utility for predicting symptom improvement with neurofeedback training. In conclusion, patients with schizophrenia and associated auditory verbal hallucinations who exhibit a learning pattern more characterized by within-session aptitude may benefit from electroencephalography neurofeedback. Furthermore, independent of the training group, a significant spatial pre-post difference was found in the event-related component P200 ( P = .04).
View Full Paper →Neurofeedback by neural correlates of auditory selective attention as possible application for tinnitus therapies
More and more people are suffering from tinnitus. There are many treatments for tinnitus that have been claimed based on different causes. Unfortunately, until now none of the existing treatments has been found to be effective in general. Here, we would like to suggest a treatment to tinnitus based on neurofeedback using neural correlates of auditory selective evoked potentials (ASEPs). We have shown that the wavelet phase synchronization of auditory late responses (ALR) single sweeps allows for a direct online monitoring of phase locked auditory attention. The results show that after a simple training, subjects learned to control their attention to the auditory modality. To improve the ability in the attention control system is an objective of many tinnitus treatments, so that the perception of the patients towards the tinnitus noise can be reduced to a minimum. It is concluded that our proposed neurofeedback system by wavelet phase synchronization measure might be used in a clinical treatment of tinnitus patients and it is possible to extent to other therapeutic based control systems.
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