Sensory gating refers to the phenomenon of the suppression of response to the second of the two identical stimuli (usually, short clicks) when they are presented with a short inter-stimulus interval (less than 1 second). The degree of the suppression, or “gating”, of the second stimulus can be measured using the difference between ERP amplitudes elicited by the first and the second stimulus in the pair. Historically, this effect has been measured using the early P50 component reflecting largely pre-attentive sensory processing.
