Visual mismatch negativity and its importance in visual cognitive sciences.

This review paper on visual mismatch negativity (MMN), an event-related brain potential component, provides arguments in favor of its theoretical importance in visual cognitive sciences. We propose that (a) previous visual MMN findings can be regarded as ample evidence for the existence of unintentional prediction about the next state of a visual object in the immediate future on the basis of its temporal context ('unintentional temporal-context-based prediction in vision'); (b) such predictive processes may be qualitatively similar to those revealed by behavioral phenomena, such as representational momentum, flash-lag effect, and perceptual sequence learning; (c) such predictive processes may provide advantages for our adaptation to the visual environment at the computational, neural, and behavioral levels, and (d) in concert with such behavioral phenomena, visual MMN could be a unique and powerful tool for tapping into the predictive power of the human visual system.