Intelligence and Visual Mismatch Negativity: Is Pre-Attentive Visual Discrimination Related to General Cognitive Ability?

Abstract

Intelligence captures the cognitive ability level of an individual person and electroencephalography (EEG) has been used for decades to identify neurocognitive processes related to intelligence. The mismatch negativity (MMN) is a component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) that is elicited when, within a series of frequent standard stimuli, rare deviant stimuli are presented. As stimuli are typically presented outside the focus of attention, the MMN is suggested to capture automatic pre-attentive discrimination processes, and mixed results have been reported in relation to intelligence. However, the MMN and its relation to intelligence has only been studied in the auditory domain, thus preventing any conclusion about the involvement of automatic discrimination processes in humans dominant sensory modality, i.e., vision. Here we provide a first test of this question. Electroencephalography was recorded from 50 healthy participants during a passive visual oddball task that presented simple sequence violations as well as deviations within a more complex hidden pattern. Signed area amplitudes and fractional area latencies of the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) were calculated with and without Laplacian transformation. Neither vMMN amplitudes nor vMMN latencies were significantly related to intelligence (Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices, RAPM) and Bayes Factors suggest moderate evidence for the absence of associations. Our study presents the first test of whether neural indices of pre-attentive visual discrimination processes are related to intelligence. We discuss critical differences between the auditory and visual MMN and conclude with a discussion of limitations and recommendations for further research in this evolving field.