Visuomotor mismatch EEG responses in occipital cortex of freely moving human subjects

Likely the strongest predictor of visual feedback is self-motion. In mice, the coupling between movement and visual feedback is learned with first visual experience of the world (Attinger et al., 2017), and brief perturbations of the coupling result in strong visuomotor mismatch responses in visual cortex that possibly reflect prediction errors (Keller et al., 2012; Zmarz and Keller, 2016). In humans, predictive coding has primarily been studied using oddball paradigms which rely on violations of stimulus probability based on recent sensory history. It was still unclear, however, whether humans exhibit visuomotor mismatch responses similar to those observed in mice. This question was important for two reasons. First, visuomotor mismatch responses in humans constitute a basis to start translating the mechanistic understanding of the circuit that computes these responses from mouse to human cortex. Second, a paradigm that can trigger strong prediction error responses and consequently requires shorter recording times would simplify experiments in a clinical setting. Here, by combining a wireless EEG recording system with virtual reality headset, we found robust visuomotor mismatch responses in human cortex that were characterized by a reversed polarity relative to visual evoked responses and a greater signal power than both visual responses and oddball mismatch responses.