Abstract
Automatic detection of environmental change is a core component of attention. The mismatch negativity (MMN), an electrophysiological marker of this mechanism, has been studied prominently in the auditory domain, with cortical generators identified in temporal and frontal regions. Here, we combined electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess whether the underlying frontal regions associated with auditory change detection also play a role in visual change detection. Twenty healthy young adults completed a visual MMN task in separate EEG and fMRI sessions. Region of interest analyses were conducted on left and right middle frontal (MFG) and inferior frontal (IFG) gyri, i.e., the frontal areas identified as potential auditory MMN generators. A significant increase in activation was observed in the left IFG and MFG in response to blocks containing deviant stimuli. These findings suggest that a frontal mechanism is involved in the detection of change in the visual MMN. Our results support the notion that frontal mechanisms underlie attention switching, as measured via MMN, across multiple modalities.
Highlights
The Mismatch Negativity (MMN) is an electrophysiological response that reflects the automatic detection of change in the sensory environment, and is elicited by violating an established regularity in a sequence of sensory stimuli
We observed an increase in activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG)/middle frontal gyrus (MFG) during blocks containing infrequent, ‘deviant’ stimuli, relative to blocks consisting only of ‘standard’ stimuli
The role of the frontal mechanisms underlying the auditory MMN (aMMN) has been described as one of attention orientation or triggering, following from the detection of change in sensory processing regions [10,41]. The association of this function with the IFG in the literature is consistent with models implicating this region in alerting and executive attention networks (e.g., [17]), as well as proposals that sub-regions of the right inferior frontal cortex support the detection of a behaviorally relevant cue [79]
Summary
The Mismatch Negativity (MMN) is an electrophysiological response that reflects the automatic detection of change in the sensory environment, and is elicited by violating an established regularity in a sequence of sensory stimuli. Such violations can take the form of simple physical changes in the stimulus properties (e.g., [47]), abstract deviations in the relationships between stimuli (e.g., [3]), or a non- symmetrical stimulus in a sequence of symmetrical stimuli (e.g., [29]). The aim of this study was to use both EEG and functional imaging to assess whether a frontal source contributes to the vMMN, which may indicate a multi-modal mechanism for the low-level detection of stimulus change
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