An Event-Related fMRI Study of
Visual and Auditory Oddball Tasks
Kent A. Kiehl1, Kristin R. Laurens2, Timothy L. Duty3,
Bruce B. Forster4, and Peter F. Liddle5
1Institute of Living, Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine
Departments of 2Psychiatry, 3Physics, and 4Radiology, University of British Columbia
5Department of Psychiatry, University of Nottingham
Accepted for publication: 12 May 2001
Keywords: Event-related fMRI, oddball, P300, P3, novel, target, visual stimuli
Journal of Psychophysiology 15 (2001) 221–240 © 2001 Federation of European Psychophysiology Societies
Abstract Whole brain event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques were employed to elucidate the
cerebral sites involved in processing rare target and novel visual stimuli during an oddball discrimination task. The analyses of the
hemodynamic response to the visual target stimuli revealed a distributed network of neural sources in anterior and posterior cingulate,
inferior and middle frontal gyrus, bilateral parietal lobules, anterior superior temporal gyrus, amygdala, and thalamus. The analyses
of the hemodynamic response for the visual novel stimuli revealed an extensive network of neural activations in occipital lobes and
posterior temporal lobes, bilateral parietal lobules, and lateral frontal cortex. The hemodynamic response associated with processing
target and novel stimuli in the visual modalitywere also comparedwith data froman analogous study in the auditory modality (Kiehl
et al., 2001). Similar patterns of activation were observed for target and novel stimuli in both modalities, but there were some
significant differences. The results support the hypothesis that target detection and novelty processing are associated with neural
activation in widespread neural areas, suggesting that the brain seems to adopt a strategy of activating many potentially useful brain
regions despite the low probability that these brain regions are necessary for task performance.