Abstract
The event-related P3 potential, as elicited in auditory signal detection tasks, originates from neural activity of multiple cortical structures and presumably reflects an overlap of several cognitive processes. The fact that the P3 is affected by aging makes it a potential metric for age-related cognitive change. The P3 in older participants is thought to encompass frontal compensatory activity in addition to task-related processes. The current study investigates this by decomposing the P3 using group independent component analysis (ICA). Independent components (IC) of young and old participants were compared in order to investigate the effects of aging. Exact low-resolution tomography analysis (eLORETA) was used to compare current source densities between young and old participants for the P3-ICs to localize differences in cortical source activity for every IC. One of the P3-related ICs reflected a different constellation of cortical generators in older participants compared to younger participants, suggesting that this P3-IC reflects shifts in neural activations and compensatory processes with aging. This P3-IC was localized to the orbitofrontal/temporal, and the medio-parietal regions. For this IC, older participants showed more frontal activation and less parietal activation as measured on the scalp. The differences in cortical sources were localized in the precentral gyrus and the parahippocampal gyrus. This finding might reflect compensatory activity recruited from these cortical sources during a signal detection task.
Highlights
The P3 is a positive-going event-related potential recorded in the electroencephalogram that peaks at approximately 300 milliseconds after stimulus presentation (Sutton et al 1965)
This study aims at unraveling aging effects on cognitive processes that are involved in signal detection tasks by identifying the independent sources that contribute to the P3 wave as observed in the recorded ERP
The aim of the present study was to unravel aging effects on oddball ERPs, and especially focusing on the P3 elicited in an auditory oddball paradigm
Summary
The P3 (or P300) is a positive-going event-related potential recorded in the electroencephalogram that peaks at approximately 300 milliseconds after stimulus presentation (Sutton et al 1965). The P3 that is elicited in an auditory signal detection task, i.e. the oddball paradigm (Ritter and Vaughan 1969), presumably reflects overlapping activity of several cognitive processes. It is generated by neural activity of multiple cortical structures (Friedman 2003). The parietal P3 amplitude increased in childhood to reach its peak in adolescence, declined for the rest of the lifespan. The frontal P3 amplitude reached its peak at a much older age, 46 years, after which it remained constant for the rest of the lifespan. The frontal P3 amplitude might reflect compensatory activity from frontal regions that becomes more prominent as people age (Van Dinteren et al 2014a)
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