Emotional visual mismatch negativity: a joint investigation of social and non-social dimensions in adults with autism

Abstract

Unusual behaviors and brain activity to socio-emotional stimuli have been reported in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Atypical reactivity to change and intolerance of uncertainty are also present, but little is known on their possible impact on facial expression processing in autism. The visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) is an electrophysiological response automatically elicited by changing events such as deviant emotional faces presented among regular neutral faces. While vMMN has been found altered in ASD in response to low-level changes in simple stimuli, no study has investigated this response to visual social stimuli. Here two deviant expressions were presented, neutral and angry, embedded in a sequence of repetitive neutral stimuli. vMMN peak analyses were performed for latency and amplitude in early and late time windows. The ASD group presented smaller amplitude of the late vMMN to both neutral and emotional deviants compared to the typically developed adults (TD) group, and only the TD group presented a sustained activity related to emotional change (i.e., angry deviant). Source reconstruction of the vMMNs further revealed that any change processing elicited a reduced activity in ASD group compared to TD in the saliency network, while the specific processing emotional change elicited activity in the temporal region and in the insula. This study confirms atypical change processing in ASD and points to a specific difficulty in the processing of emotional changes, potentially playing a crucial role in social interaction deficits. Nevertheless, these results require to be further replicated with a greater sample size and generalized to other emotional expressions.

The Predictive Role of Low Spatial Frequencies in Automatic Face Processing: A Visual Mismatch Negativity Investigation

“…More generally, the experiments by File et al (2017) suggested that the pattern of vMMN response varies according to the type of stimulus and level of deviance. Source reconstruction revealed that the vMMN to HSF was associated with activity in the extrastriate cortex, which is highly consistent with previous findings on vMMN to face (Kimura et al, 2012;Kovarski et al, 2021) or to other visual stimuli (e.g., Kimura et al, 2010;Urakawa et al, 2010;Susac et al, 2014). This suggests that MMN is modality specific (vMMN being elicited in visual areas while auditory MMN is elicited in auditory cortex- Näätänen et al, 2007) and relatively low-level (Susac et al, 2014).…”

“…Sources of this mismatch were found in a wide range of brain regions, from the right fusiform to the prefrontal and cingulate anterior regions, including the insula. Generators in temporal and limbic lobes were also described in other studies (Kimura et al, 2012;Li et al, 2012;Kovarski et al, 2021), as well as frontal activation (Kimura et al, 2010(Kimura et al, , 2012. The fusiform activity is in line with the preferential processing of faces (Kimura et al, 2012;Stefanics et al, 2012) especially in the right hemisphere, consistently with previous results on face vMMN (Kimura et al, 2012;FIGURE 4 | Contrast between HSF and LSF mismatch responses.…”

“…Generators in temporal and limbic lobes were also described in other studies (Kimura et al, 2012 ; Li et al, 2012 ; Kovarski et al, 2021 ), as well as frontal activation (Kimura et al, 2010 , 2012 ). The fusiform activity is in line with the preferential processing of faces (Kimura et al, 2012 ; Stefanics et al, 2012 ) especially in the right hemisphere, consistently with previous results on face vMMN (Kimura et al, 2012 ; Kovarski et al, 2021 ). Note that positive prefrontal activation is elicited in the second time window whereas occipito-temporal activation is elicited from the first steps of vMMN.…”

“…(D) Source reconstruction for the significant clusters with activity averaged over the corresponding time window with MNI coordinates. Kovarski et al, 2021). Note that positive prefrontal activation is elicited in the second time window whereas occipito-temporal activation is elicited from the first steps of vMMN.…”

Temporal gradient characteristics of automatic neural representation for orthographic consistency in Chinese characters

“…We conducted this analysis through the use of the Fieldtrip toolbox (Oostenveld et al, 2011) in MATLAB. We developed grand-averages of differential waveforms across two regions of interest (ROI) that correspond to the left (P7, PO7, O1) and right (P8, PO8, O2) posterior occipital-temporal electrodes (the electrodes were selected based on previous studies, e.g., Hu et al, 2020; Kovarski et al, 2021). For each time point (within 0 – 700 ms) at left or right electrodes, the clusters were formed through two or more neighboring time points whenever the t values (obtained by two-tailed t -test) exceeded the cluster threshold (0.025).…”