Frontotemporal network in automatic / pre-attentive detection of abstract change: An event-related optical signal (EROS) study

The human brain constantly monitors the environment for unexpected changes. Under the prediction violation account, the Inferior Frontal Cortex (IFC) is involved in prediction-related processes for deviance detection processes in the Superior Temporal Cortex (STC). Consistent with this account, previous studies revealed an IFC-to-STC-followed-by-IFC mismatch response pattern to physical changes using event-related optical signals (EROS). However, detecting physical changes can be achieved by direct comparison of physical features between stimuli without making predictions, thus direct evidence supporting the prediction nature of the IFC-STC network in pre-attentive change detection was lacking. To address this issue, this study examined the EROS mismatch responses of the IFC-STC network when detecting the violation of an abstract rule. The rule “the higher the frequency of a tone, the stronger the intensity” established by standards was violated by deviants of 12 deviance levels. When deviants were preceded by a short train of standards, early IFC, STC, and late IFC EROS mismatch responses linearly increased with the deviance levels. When deviants were preceded by a longer train of standards, the STC but not the early or late IFC EROS mismatch responses were elicited by all the deviants without modulation by deviance levels. These results demonstrate a functional role of the IFC in the abstract change detection when insufficient rule-conforming information could be extracted from the preceding standards and are consistent with the predictive violation account of pre-attentive change detection.