Automatic pairing of complex stimuli in younger and older adults: An event-related potential study

Contextual information can influence object perception even when task-irrelevant, and temporally adjacent stimuli may become automatically associated, potentially more strongly in older adults due to reduced inhibitory control. We examined such associations using vMMN in younger and older adults viewing unattended scene–emotional face pairs in a contextual oddball paradigm. While a control condition with emotional faces alone elicited vMMN in both groups, no vMMN emerged for rare scene–emotional face pairings. Instead, younger adults showed an early posterior positivity, whereas older adults exhibited a later negativity. These findings indicate that temporally proximal, unrelated stimuli can form associations, but their violations engage age-dependent neural mechanisms distinct from classical vMMN.