Event-Related Potentials during a Problem-Solving Task

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses event-related potentials during a problem-solving task. Several components of the event-related potential have been associated with human information processing. In particular, the late positive component (P3 or P300) has been related during various tasks to the amount of information processed, the degree of template matching, the updating of context, and syntactic closure. This study has given evidence for 3 distinct components of the human event-related potential occurring during a complex problem-solving task. Certain of these components overlap to some extent, thereby making difficult their precise evaluation in the raw evoked potential waveforms. There is an early positive component (factor 2) that occurs maximally with the first slide in the sequence. This is possibly related to the fixation of stimulus attributes for later comparison. There is a later P3 component (factor 1) that is larger in response to those stimuli that provide relevant information for problem solution. This component is not highly correlated to the amount of information in the stimuli, to the extent of mismatch occurring, or to the occurrence of the problem solution.