Abstract
Oddball designs are widely used to investigate the sensitivity of the visual system to statistical regularities in sensory environments. However, the underlying mechanisms that give rise to visual mismatch responses remain unknown. Much research has focused on identifying separable, additive effects of stimulus repetition and stimulus appearance probability (expectation/surprise) but findings from non-oddball designs indicate that these effects also interact. We adapted the fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) unfamiliar face identity oddball design (Liu-Shuang et al., 2014) to test for both additive and interactive effects of stimulus repetition and stimulus expectation. In two experiments, a given face identity was presented at a 6 Hz periodic rate; a different identity face (the oddball) appeared as every 7th image in the sequence (i.e., at 0.857 Hz). Electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was recorded during these stimulation sequences. In Experiment 1, we tested for surprise responses evoked by unexpected face image repetitions by replacing 10% of the commonly-presented oddball faces with exact repetitions of the base rate face identity image. In Experiment 2, immediately repeated or unrepeated face identity oddballs were presented in high and low presentation probability contexts (i.e., expected or surprising contexts), allowing assessment of expectation effects on responses to both repeated and unrepeated stimuli. Across both experiments objective (i.e., frequency-locked) visual mismatch responses driven by stimulus expectation were only found for oddball faces of a different identity to base rate faces (i.e., unrepeated identity oddballs). Our results show that immediate stimulus repetition (i.e., repetition suppression) can reduce or abolish expectation effects as indexed by EEG responses in visual oddball designs.
Highlights
The visual oddball design has been widely used to investigate the sensitivity of sensory systems to environmental statistical regularities (Grimm, Escera, & Nelken, 2016; Stefanics, Astikainen, & Czigler, 2014)
Comparisons of event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked in the human electroencephalogram (EEG) by the critical stimulus in the two contexts (i.e., AStandard vs. ADeviant) reveal more negative-going waveforms evoked by deviants at posterior electrodes between 150–300 ms (Czigler, Balazs, & Pato, 2004; Kimura, Katayama, Ohira, & Schroger, 2009; Stefanics, Kimura, & Czigler, 2011), an effect known as the visual mismatch negativity
Our design differs from previous fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) face identity oddball designs, in that we presented only two different face images as oddballs within any given sequence, whereas previous experiments presented a large range of different face identities as oddball stimuli within a sequence (e.g., Dzhelyova & Rossion, 2014a, 2014b; Liu-Shuang et al, 2014, 2016)
Summary
The visual oddball design has been widely used to investigate the sensitivity of sensory systems to environmental statistical regularities (Grimm, Escera, & Nelken, 2016; Stefanics, Astikainen, & Czigler, 2014). In this design, a task-irrelevant critical stimulus is presented in high and low probability contexts. Comparisons of event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked in the human electroencephalogram (EEG) by the critical stimulus in the two contexts (i.e., AStandard vs ADeviant) reveal more negative-going waveforms evoked by deviants at posterior electrodes between 150–300 ms (Czigler, Balazs, & Pato, 2004; Kimura, Katayama, Ohira, & Schroger, 2009; Stefanics, Kimura, & Czigler, 2011), an effect known as the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN; for recent reviews see Kimura, Schroger, & Czigler, 2011; Stefanics et al, 2014). The magnitude of the visual mismatch response differs between healthy and clinical samples across a wide range of psychiatric and neurological
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