Magnetic source localization of early visual mismatch response

Previous studies have reported a visual analogue of the auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) response that is based on sensory memory. The neural generators and attention dependence of the visual MMN (vMMN) still remain unclear. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) and spatio-temporal source localization to determine the generators of the sensory-memory-based vMMN response to non-attended deviants. Ten participants were asked to discriminate between odd and even digits presented at the center of the visual field while grating patterns with different spatial frequencies were presented outside the focus of attention. vMMN was calculated as the difference between MEG responses to infrequent gratings in oddball blocks and the same gratings in equiprobable blocks. The peak latency of the vMMN response was between 100 and 160 ms. The neuromagnetic sources of the vMMN localized in the occipital cortex differed from the sources evoked by the equiprobable gratings and were stimulus-dependent. Our results suggest the existence of separate neural systems for pre-attentive memory-based detection of visual change and provide new evidence that the vMMN is feature-specific.