Beyond the sound: Uncovering the distinct neural mechanisms of ERAN and MMN in music perception

The early right anterior negativity (ERAN) is an event-related potential commonly attributed to music-specific syntactic processing. An alternative account, however, regards ERAN as a subtype of mismatch negativity (MMN), a generalized neural response to auditory deviations. The present study employed time-generalized multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) and representational similarity analysis (RSA) to examine whether ERAN and MMN-including physical MMN (phMMN) and abstract-feature MMN (afMMN)-reflect shared or distinct neurocognitive processes. Cross-condition decoding revealed that classifiers trained on afMMN data accurately classified phMMN trials and vice versa, whereas classifiers trained on ERAN failed to classify MMN trials (afMMN or phMMN) effectively. Additional RSA supported this dissociation, with theoretical models assuming independence between MMN and ERAN better fitting the neural data. These results convergently suggest that the ERAN is functionally and neurologically distinct from MMN, shedding light on the nature of musical syntactic processing. As well, by integrating MVPA and RSA, we introduce a novel methodological framework for investigating the neurocognitive processing of music.