The rapid formation of echoicmemory-traces is an essential property
of the auditory system. It prepares us to adequately respond to potentially
relevant changes in our acoustic environment and anticipate
future events. One of the most widely-studied phenomena in cognitive
neuroscience is repetition suppression (RS), a decrease in the neural response
elicited by the repetition of a specific stimulus.Suppression, or adaptation, has been observed in different sensory
modalities, species, and in different spatial and temporal scales, using
both neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques 2006). RS is proposed to reflect the sharpening
of the neural responses during stimulus encoding at different processing
stages, and an increase of the precision with which future sensory
events can be predicted. It is suggested as the mechanism
underlying perceptual priming, implicit memory, and sensory
memory-trace formation