Theory
The mainstream "memory trace" interpretation of MMN is that it is elicited in response to violations of simple rules governing the properties of information. It is thought to arise from violation of an automatically formed, short-term neural model or memory trace of physical or abstract environmental regularities (Näätänen & Winkler, 1999; Näätänen, Paavilainen, Rinne, & Alho 2007). However, other than MMN, there is no other neurophysiological evidence for the formation of the memory representation of those regularities.
Integral to this memory trace view is that there are: i) a population of sensory afferent neuronal elements that respond to sound, and; ii) a separate population of memory neuronal elements that build a neural model of standard stimulation and respond more vigorously when the incoming stimulation violates that neural model, eliciting an MMN.
An alternative "fresh afferent" interpretation (Näätänen, 1992; Jääskeläinen et al., 2004) is that there are no memory neuronal elements, but the sensory afferent neuronal elements that are tuned to properties of the standard stimulation respond less vigorously upon repeated stimulation. Thus when a deviant activates a distinct new population of neuronal elements that is tuned to the different properties of the deviant rather than the standard, these fresh afferents respond more vigorously, eliciting an MMN.
A third view is that the sensory afferents are the memory neurons (Ulanovsky, 2004; Jääskeläinen et al., 2007).
Read more about this topic: Mismatch Negativity
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