The mismatch response, first described by Näätänen and colleagues (Naatanen et al. 1987; Naatanen and Alho 1997; Naatanen 2001, 2003), provides a measure of the pre-attentive detection of a difference in the attributes of an infrequently presented "deviant" stimulus compared to the properties represented in the memory trace of frequently presented "standard" stimuli.
The superior temporal cortex (STC) and inferior frontal cortex (IFC) are active during pre-attentive change detection.
Rare auditory deviants elicit a mismatch negativity (MMN) indicative of pre-attentive change detection (for a review see [13]).
ERP amplitude differences between emotional and neutral expressions indicated pre-attentive change detection of facial expressions among neutral faces.
The posterior negative difference at 150 180 ms latency resembled visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) – an index of pre-attentive change detection previously studied only to changes in low-level features in vision.
In any case, even if the present study can not provide unequivocal support for the presence of vMMN separate of face-sensitive N170, the ERPs reported in the present study provide evidence for pre-attentive change detection of positive and negative facial emotions.
It is therefore important that the professionals involved in healthcare are attentive to quick detection of signs and symptoms associated with the condition.
Specifically, MEG recordings were used to investigate the neural and functional correlates of the pre-attentive ability for detection of deviance, from a statistically learned tone sequence.
Both a pre-attentive bias for detection of threat-related information as well as difficulty disengaging threat-related emotional material from conscious awareness are considered to be involved in delusional beliefs (Green and Phillips, 2004).
Here, we present a neural network model of motion detection, figure ground segregation and attentive selection which explains these response patterns in an unifying framework.
In predator-prey interactions, this attentive immobility functions to decrease the likelihood of detection since the visual cortex of mammalian carnivores is programmed to detect moving objects.
