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The present study investigated whether gender information for human faces was represented by the predictive mechanism indexed by the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) event-related brain potential (ERP). While participants performed a continuous size-change-detection task, random sequences of cropped faces were presented in the background, in an oddball setting: either various female faces were presented infrequently among various male faces, or vice versa. In Experiment 1 the inter-stimulus-interval (ISI) was 400 ms, while in Experiment 2 the ISI was 2250 ms. The ISI difference had only a small effect on the P1 component, however the subsequent negativity (N1/N170) was larger and more widely distributed at longer ISI, showing different aspects of stimulus processing. As deviant-minus-standard ERP difference, a parieto-occipital negativity (vMMN) emerged in the 200–500 ms latency range (~350 ms peak latency in both experiments). We argue that regularity of gender on the photographs is automatically registered, and the violation of the gender category is reflected by the vMMN. In conclusion the results can be interpreted as evidence for the automatic activity of a predictive brain mechanism, in case of an ecologically valid category.

The aim of our studies was to separate the effects of violating a sequential rule (genuine visual mismatch negativity; gvMMN) from the decreased activity in response to repeated stimuli (stimulus-specific adaptation; SSA) for simple and more complex stimuli. To accomplish this goal, different control procedures were applied with the aim of finding the correct control for vMMN studies. Event-related brain electric activity (ERPs) was measured in response to nonattended visual stimuli that were presented either in an oddball manner or in various control sequences. To identify the cortical sources of the different processes, the sLORETA inverse solution was applied to the average ERP time series. In Experiment 1, the stimuli were line textures, and the deviancy was different line orientations. SSA fully explained the deviant-related ERP effects (increased posterior negativity in the 105-190 ms range). In Experiments 2 and 3, windmill patterns were used. Infrequent windmill patterns with 12 vanes elicited gvMMN (posterior negativities in the 100-200 and 200-340 ms ranges), whereas in the case of the less complex (six vanes) stimuli, SSA explained the negative deflection in both latency ranges (178-216 and 270-346 ms). In Experiment 3, infrequent stimuli with six vanes elicited deviant-related posterior negativity within the sequence of less complex (four vanes) frequent patterns. We reconcile the discrepant results by proposing that the underlying processes of vMMN are not uniform but depend strongly on the eliciting stimulus and that the complexity difference between the infrequent and frequent stimuli has considerable influence on the deviant-related response.