Spatiotemporal principal component analysis for event-related potentials in three oddball paradigms under meaningful noise

Abstract

Open offices that make effective use of limited space and encourage dialogue, interaction, and collaboration among employees, are becoming an increasingly. However, productive work-related conversation might actually decrease the performance of other employees within earshot more so than other random, meaningless noises. It is well known that the eventrelated potentials (ERPs) in the brain wave elicited by internal or external stimuli are related to the operation of selective attention. The presence of noise during the performance of cognitive tasks involving such as memory, commonly causes a subjective experience of annoyance, which can lead to a decline in performance. This tendency is stronger in response to meaningful noise, such as music and conversation, than for meaningless noise, such as the sound of traffic, and heating ventilating and air-conditioning noise. The present experiment was designed to determine the effects of meaningfulness of the external noise on the ERPs in the auditory three odd-ball paradigms. Multivariate analysis such as the spatiotemporal Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for components of ERPs was performed.