Research reportA frontal attention mechanism in the visual mismatch negativity

•We examine frontal mechanisms underlying the visual mismatch negativity.•EEG and fMRI activity was examined in respect to unattended oddball stimuli.•Left inferior frontal gyrus was associated with changes in the stimuli.•Our findings correspond to similarly implicated regions in the auditory domain.

Automatic detection of environmental change is a core component of attention. The mismatch negativity (MMN), an electrophysiological marker of this mechanism, has been studied prominently in the auditory domain, with cortical generators identified in temporal and frontal regions. Here, we combined electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess whether the underlying frontal regions associated with auditory change detection also play a role in visual change detection. Twenty healthy young adults completed a visual MMN task in separate EEG and fMRI sessions. Region of interest analyses were conducted on left and right middle frontal (MFG) and inferior frontal (IFG) gyri, i.e., the frontal areas identified as potential auditory MMN generators. A significant increase in activation was observed in the left IFG and MFG in response to blocks containing deviant stimuli. These findings suggest that a frontal mechanism is involved in the detection of change in the visual MMN. Our results support the notion that frontal mechanisms underlie attention switching, as measured via MMN, across multiple modalities.