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The quest for the genuine visual mismatch negativity (vMMN): Event‐related potential indications of deviance detection for low‐level visual features
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

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

Alie G Male, Robert P O’Shea, Erich Schröger, Dagmar Müller, Urte Roeber and Andreas Widmann
Psychophysiology, Vol.57(6), e13576
06/2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13576
PMID: 32293040
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Abstract

phase electroencephalography ERP orientation EEG visual mismatch negativity adaptation spatial frequency vMMN event‐related potentials vision eye movement contrast attention Gabor patch
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 300 ms 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. We reviewed the current visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) research, in which deviance was determined by changes in basic properties of visual input, such as orientation, contrast, and spatial frequency. We also conducted two electrophysiological (EEG) experiments. We show that isolated changes in basic properties of visual input, including orientation, contrast, phase, and spatial frequency, do not evoke the vMMN, when controlling for eye‐movement, attention, adaptation, and all visual stimulus parameters; thus, illustrating the importance of controlling for such parameters. Instead, we discovered an early deviant‐related positivity that may be a new neural correlate of prediction error in vision.

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