No Effect of Value on the Task Irrelevant Auditory Mismatch Negativity

Behavioural and neuroscientific evidence suggests visual stimuli that signal value involuntarily capture attention and are preferentially processed, even when unattended. We examined whether learned value associations for task-irrelevant auditory stimuli modulate pre-attentive processing and involuntarily capture attention. Across two experiments, the effect of learned value on the visual- and auditory-evoked mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a event-related potential (ERP) components was measured. Participants performed a primary visual detection task while an irrelevant, unattended oddball stimulus stream was concurrently presented. Deviants within this oddball stream had been previously learned to signal one of several value outcomes: monetary reward, loss or no change. Neither the auditory nor the visual MMN was influenced by these value associations. However, stimulus value affected performance on the primary task and the magnitude of the P3a in those who could identify the stimulus-value pairings at test. Supplementary mass univariate analyses and time frequency decomposition (theta phase-locking) confirmed the presence of the MMN and the absence of any influence of stimulus value on the MMN response. Findings suggest that learned value associations do not meaningfully influence the MMN prediction signaling mechanism for task-irrelevant auditory stimuli.