Fronto-occipital mismatch responses in pre-attentive detection of visual changes: Implication on a generic brain network underlying Mismatch Negativity (MMN)

Belief in biological origin of race (racial essentialism) increases sensitivities to cultural category changes measured by ERP mismatch negativity (MMN)

“…For the low racial essentialism group, vMMN was only observed to the Eastern deviant with high cultural relevance ( t (19) = − 3.67, p < 0.001, d = − 0.82), but not to the Eastern deviant with high cultural relevance, or the Western deviants with high or low cultural relevance ( ts (19) = − 1.02 to 1.55, ps = 0.16 to 0.48, ds = 0.018 to − 0.23). The effect sizes of the vMMNs ranged from − 0.44 to − 0.82, which were similar to the vMMNs that were calculated with properly controlled standards or control stimuli and elicited by abstract deviants 18 , 37 , 45 . A larger MMN effect size could be observed if the MMN was contaminated by the brain responses to the physical differences between the deviant and standard and/or the adaptation confound.…”

“…To capture the complex MMN response generated from a fronto-sensory cortical network 14 , 17 , 18 , 20 , 57 , a difference waveform approach 58 is commonly used to dissociate the MMN from the sensory or early ERP components. Similar to most MMN studies, difference waveforms were calculated by subtracting the ERPs of deviants with that of the physically identical standards for each condition in the current study.…”

“…Deviant events violating the regularities or expectations automatically elicit the MMN for signaling remedial actions. A generic fronto-sensory cortical network with forward and backward connections 14 – 17 underlying a prediction violation mechanism in MMN generation across sensory modalities was suggested 18 . The MMN is not only sensitive to changes in physical features like colors 19 or pitch of tones 20 , but also to changes in emotion 21 , abstract color properties 22 , pitch interval rules 23 , 24 , feature conjunction rules 25 , or social categories, such as gender 26 , 27 .…”

“…In laboratory settings, a visual passive oddball paradigm 18 , 29 is typically used to elicit MMNs in the visual modality (vMMN or visual mismatch responses, vMMR; from here, we adopt the nomenclature that MMN refers to the general, non-sensory specific mismatch brain response elicited in pre-attentive change detection, while aMMN refers to the MMN in auditory modality). Participants engage in a task presented at the foveal region of the visual field, while task-irrelevant infrequent deviants are randomly presented among a stream of frequent standards in the peripheral visual field.…”

“…The vMMN peaks from 100 to 400 ms after the onset of perceptual deviance (which is not necessarily aligned with the stimulus onset) with a central and/or right posterior scalp distribution 31 depending on the deviance properties. Deviance in simple physical properties (e.g., color, orientation) typically elicited an early mismatch response (< 200 ms) with right posterior scalp distribution, while deviance in abstract properties (e.g., semantics) elicited vMMNs with a delayed latency (around 400 ms) and a central scalp distribution 18 , 32 – 34 (see 35 , 36 for an alternative view). The differences of the vMMN latencies and scalp distributions in detecting abstract versus physical changes were related to increases in the complexity of cognitive processing and overall frontal cortex activities, as well as differences in the dynamics of the frontal-sensory cortical network 18 , 25 , 37 .…”