PROJECT: JTC2009: PANS

The present research program aims at integrating the efforts of four world-wide leaders from three different countries (Spain, Israel, Finland) towards the understanding of the auditory novelty system, while providing a new testing protocol of cognitive dysfunction in pre-term born infants. This will be achieved by a multidisciplinary approach encompassing, for the first time, the recording of human (EEG and MEG) and animal (single unit, multi unit, local field and epidural) novelty responses elicited at multiple levels of the auditory pathway and cortices to common experimental protocols tapping novelty occurring in simple-feature and high-order acoustic regularities. The data will be integrated into a comprehensive unitary model on the auditory novelty system that will guide the design of testing protocols for assessing cognitive sequelae of prematurity after standardization in a population of human newborns and application to a sample of babies born preterm. As a result, we will transfer our basic research on the auditory novelty system into a standardized protocol to assess cognitive function in infants born preterm that should guide the rapid implementation of preventive intervention.