Visual mismatch negativity (vMMN): A review and meta-analysis of studies in psychiatric and neurological disorders

Abstract

The visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) response is an event-related potential (ERP) component, which is automatically elicited by events that violate predictions based on prior events. VMMN experiments use visual stimulus repetition to induce predictions, and vMMN is obtained by subtracting the response to rare unpredicted stimuli from those to frequent stimuli. One increasingly popular interpretation of the mismatch response postulates that vMMN, similar to its auditory counterpart (aMMN), represents a prediction error response generated by cortical mechanisms forming probabilistic representations of sensory signals. Here we discuss the physiological and theoretical basis of vMMN and review thirty-three studies from the emerging field of its clinical applications, presenting a meta-analysis of findings in schizophrenia, mood disorders, substance abuse, neurodegenerative disorders, developmental disorders, deafness, panic disorder and hypertension. Furthermore, we include reports on aging and maturation as they bear upon many clinically relevant conditions. Surveying the literature we found that vMMN is altered in several clinical populations which is in line with aMMN findings. An important potential advantage of vMMN however is that it allows the investigation of deficits in predictive processing in cognitive domains which rely primarily on visual information; a principal sensory modality and thus of vital importance in environmental information processing and response, and a modality which arguably may be more sensitive to some pathological changes. However, due to the relative infancy of research in vMMN compared to aMMN in clinical populations its potential for clinical application is not yet fully appreciated. The aim of this review and meta-analysis therefore is to present, in a detailed systematic manner, the findings from clinically-based vMMN studies, to discuss their potential impact and application, to raise awareness of this measure and to improve our understanding of disease upon fundamental aspects of visual information processing. Furthermore, we include reports on aging and maturation as they bear upon many clinically relevant conditions. Surveying the literature we found that vMMN is altered in several 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 clinical populations which is in line with aMMN findings. An important potential advantage of vMMN however is that it allows the investigation of deficits in predictive processing in cognitive domains which rely primarily on visual information; a principal sensor...

Immediate stimulus repetition abolishes stimulus expectation and surprise effects in fast periodic visual oddball designs

“…The vMMN is considered to be the visual counterpart of the earlier-discovered auditory MMN (Naatanen, et al, 1978), and has been similarly used to investigate a range of phenomena including sensory memory/change detection (Czigler et al, 2002), perceptual discrimination (Tales & Butler, 2006), stimulus repetition effects (Amado & Kovacs, 2016), and perceptual expectations (Stefanics et al, 2014). The magnitude of the visual mismatch response differs between healthy and clinical samples across a wide range of psychiatric and neurological disorders (reviewed in Kremlacek et al, 2016), as has also been found for the auditory MMN (reviewed in Naatanen et al, 2014). Figure 1.…”

Revealing the Dysfunction of Schematic Facial-Expression Processing in Schizophrenia: A Comparative Study of Different References

“…Recently, new studies investigating vMMN in patients with psychiatric disorders have been conducted (for review see Kremláček et al, 2016). For example, a previous study has shown that deviant motion direction could elicit a reduction of vMMN signals in patients with schizophrenia, indicating the impairment of early processing of visual information (Urban et al, 2008).…”

Automatic detection of violations of statistical regularities in the periphery is affected by the focus of spatial attention: A visual mismatch negativity study

“…To assess the effect of distance on violated regularities, we analysed the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) component of the ERPs. The vMMN is elicited by deviant visual stimuli within the sequence of physically or categorically equivalent stimuli, and by stimuli‐violated complex sequential regularities (for reviews, see Czigler, ; Kimura, Schröger, & Czigler, ; Kremlaček et al., ; Stefanics, Kremlácek, & Czigler, ). Investigating the effect of spatial attention on vMMN may specify the effectiveness of automatic processes in predictive coding theory in the visual modality.…”