Neural mechanisms of auditory sensory processing in children with high intelligence

To investigate the differences in event-related potential parameters related to children's intelligence, 18 intellectually gifted children and 18 average children participated in this study. The electroencephalograms were recorded the auditory sensory memory that elicited the mismatch negativity (MMN) and late discriminative negativity (LDN), as well as involuntary attention switch that elicited the P3a and early MMN were analyzed. The results indicated that children with high intelligence had comparatively larger MMN, LDN, early MMN, P3a amplitudes, and earlier peak latency in LDN than average children. The enhanced neural function of the intellectually gifted children might be due to more spatially and temporally coordinated neural network, faster neural processing speed and more efficient neural activation functions.