Position but not color deviants result in visual mismatch negativity in an active oddball task.

Changes in the visual environment might be detected automatically. This function is provided by the sensory systems and showed, for instance, by the pop-out phenomenon. Automatic change detection is also observable within visual oddball paradigms, where rare changes are introduced in an irrelevant stimulus feature; the detection of deviant stimuli is accompanied by a negative component (so-called visual mismatch negativity) in the human event-related brain potential. In this study, the deviating stimulus feature was embedded in a task-relevant object presented in the focus of attention. With this, visual mismatch negativity was observable only with position deviants presented in the upper visual half field but not by lower half field presentation or color deviants.