The quest for the genuine visual mismatch negativity (vMMN): Event-related potential indications of deviance detection for low-level visual features.

Alie G Male,Erich Schröger,Robert P O’Shea,Dagmar Müller,Andreas Widmann,Urte Roeber

doi:10.1111/psyp.13576

Alie G Male, Erich Schröger + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13576

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Abstract

Research shows that the visual system monitors the environment for changes. For example, a left-tilted bar, a deviant, that appears after several presentations of a right-tilted bar, standards, elicits a classic visual mismatch negativity (vMMN): greater negativity for deviants than standards in event-related potentials (ERPs) between 100 and 300ms after onset of the deviant. The classic vMMN is contributed to by adaptation; it can be distinguished from the genuine vMMN that, through use of control conditions, compares standards and deviants that are equally adapted and physically identical. To determine whether the vMMN follows similar principles to the auditory mismatch negativity (MMN), in two experiments we searched for a genuine vMMN from simple, physiologically plausible stimuli that change in fundamental dimensions: orientation, contrast, phase, and spatial frequency. We carefully controlled for attention and eye movements. We found no evidence for the genuine vMMN, despite adequate statistical power. We conclude that either the genuine vMMN is a rather unstable phenomenon that depends on still-to-be-identified experimental parameters, or it is confined to visual stimuli for which monitoring across time is more natural than monitoring over space, such as for high-level features. We also observed an early deviant-related positivity that we propose might reflect earlier predictive processing.

Highlights

IntroductionSounds, touches, tastes, and smells flood our senses at every moment. Yet, we do not experience all this information, if only because it would require lots of energy for our brains to process it completely
Sights, sounds, touches, tastes, and smells flood our senses at every moment
There exist hundreds of visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) studies on many different types of deviants, we focused on changes in orientation, contrast, phase, and spatial frequency because, according to Graham (1989), these are among the key dimensions for describing the appearance of images and they are processed in the visual cortex (V1) or earlier

Summary

Introduction

Sounds, touches, tastes, and smells flood our senses at every moment. Yet, we do not experience all this information, if only because it would require lots of energy for our brains to process it completely. Our brains preferentially process unexpected changes in sensory input. | 2 of 27 is a brain response to a rare, unpredicted, different, deviant tone after a series of identical standard tones, a so-called oddball sequence. One derives the MMN by comparing event-related potentials (ERPs) from deviants and standards collected with electroencephalography (EEG). It occurs sometime between 100 and 300 ms after the onset of the deviant. We replicated Kimura et al.’s (2009) study of orientation deviants using single bars (Figure 1a, I). Again, whether orientation differences of 36° yield a genuine vMMN, we wanted to examine whether changes in other properly isolated low-level visual. We compared ERPs to standards and deviants from multi-feature blocks and ERPs to control deviants from cascadic-control blocks (Ruhnau et al, 2012)

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