Does a front-end nonlinearity confound VEP acuity measures in human infants?

The visual evoked potential is commonly used to estimate visual acuity in infants. The stimulus used is temporally modulated in order to drive the cortical response. Here it is proposed that distortion products generated by a front-end nonlinearity may contaminate the acuity estimate. Specifically, the nonlinearity might convert temporal modulation of a high spatial frequency grating into apparent whole-field flicker. Thus, the VEP may reflect an artifactual response to a high spatial frequency that is not resolved at the cortical level. If this were the case, one could null or attenuate the flicker response by adding whole-field flicker to the grating stimulus. We looked for such nulling effects in 18 infants aged 6-17 weeks. No consistent evidence was found for the nulling effect, so it was concluded that infant VEP acuity estimates are not significantly contaminated by the hypothesized distortion product.