Frontal cortex tracks surprise separately for different sensory modalities but engages a common inhibitory control mechanism
Fig 1
Cross-modal oddball task diagram.
The top row depicts the trial timing. The gray box attached to the cue illustrates the different cue properties by trial type. Each cue consisted of a visual and an auditory component. Standard visual cues consisted of a green circle, whereas unexpected visual cues were one of seven non-circular shapes shown in one of fourteen non-green colors. Standard auditory cues consisted of a 600Hz sine wave, whereas unexpected auditory cues were one of 120 individual unique birdsong segments. On a trial that contained an unexpected cue in one domain, the other dimension of the cue always contained the standard component (i.e., a cue was either unexpected in the visual or the auditory domain, never in both).