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

Current theories of pre-attentive change detection suggest a regularity or prediction violation mechanism involv-ing a frontotemporal network. Modulations of the early inferior frontal cortex (IFC) mismatch response repre-senting the effort in comparing a stimulus to the prediction, the superior temporal cortex (STC) response indi-cating deviance detection, and the late IFC response representing prediction model updating were consistently demonstrated in auditory change detection using event-related optical signal (EROS). If the prediction violation hypothesis is universal, a generic neural mechanism should be found in all sensory modalities. We postulated a generic fronto-sensory cortical network underlying the prediction violation mechanism: the IFC is responsible for non-modality-specific prediction processes while the sensory cortices are responsible for modality-specific error signal generation process. This study examined the involvement of the IFC-occipital cortex (OC) network in visual pre-attentive change detection. The EROS mismatch responses to deviant bar arrays violating a fixed orientation regularity (low in regularity abstractness) were compared to that of deviant violating a rotational ori-entation regularity (high in abstractness) while the information available for establishing the prediction model was manipulated by varying the number of standards preceding the deviants. Modulations of the IFC -OC mis-match response patterns by abstractness and train length reflected the processing demands on the prediction processes and were similar to that of the IFC-STC network in auditory change detection. These findings demon-strated that the fronto-sensory cortical network is not unique to auditory pre-attentive change detection and provided supports for a universal neural mechanism across sensory modalities as suggested by the prediction violation hypothesis.