Employed Event-related Potentials Research Articles

Differences in Children and Adolescents with Depression before and after a Remediation Program: An Event-Related Potential Study.

Depression is clinically diagnosed when a defined constellation of symptoms manifests over a specific duration with notable severity. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is characterized by the presence of five or more symptoms persisting for at least two weeks. As a profound mental health condition affecting millions globally, depression presents a considerable challenge for researchers and clinicians alike. In pediatric and adolescent populations, depression can precipitate adverse outcomes, including substance abuse, academic difficulties, risky sexual behaviors, physical health problems, impaired social relationships, and a markedly elevated risk of suicide-up to thirty times higher than the general population. This paper details a study that evaluated the efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) alone vs. CBT combined with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in a treatment program. The study cohort comprised sixteen (16) children and adolescents diagnosed with depression (eight males and eight females) and sixteen (16) typically developing peers (eight males and eight females) aged from 9 to 15 years (Mean age = 11.94, standard deviation = 2.02). Initial assessments employed Event-Related Potentials (ERPs), the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI), and reaction time measurements. The results reveal that participants with depression exhibit cognitive deficits in attention and memory, as evidenced by prolonged P300 latencies. Following intervention with either CBT alone or CBT combined with medication, the depressed participants demonstrated significant improvements, evidenced by lower CDI scores, reduced P300 latencies, and faster reaction times, both compared to their pre-treatment status and relative to the control group.

Social power modulates individuals’ neural responses to monetary and social rewards

Although previous research has shown that social power modulates individuals’ sensitivity to rewards, it is currently unclear whether social power increases or decreases individuals’ sensitivity to rewards. This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the effects of social power on individuals’ neural responses to monetary and social rewards. Specifically, participants underwent an episodic priming task to manipulate social power (high-power vs. low-power) and then completed monetary and social delayed incentive tasks while their behavioral responses and electroencephalograms (EEG) were recorded. According to ERP analysis, during the anticipatory stage, low-power individuals exhibited a greater cue-P3 amplitude than high-power individuals in both monetary and social tasks. In the consummatory stage, though no impact of social power on the reward positivity (RewP) was found, low-power individuals showed a higher feedback-P3 (FB-P3) amplitude than high-power individuals, regardless of task types (the MID and SID tasks). In conclusion, these results provide evidence that social power might decrease one’s sensitivity to monetary and social rewards in both the anticipatory and consummatory stages.

Neural Responses to Mandatory and Voluntary Donation Impact Charitable Giving Decisions: An Event-Related Potentials Study.

The present study aimed to explore the influence of donation amounts on donation decisions in different donation contexts and to reveal the psychological mechanisms. Furthermore, we focused on how to enhance individuals’ intention to donate voluntarily. We designed an experiment on donation decisions, employing event-related potentials (ERPs) to probe the effect of psychological mechanisms on donation decisions by detecting the neural basis of donation decision-making. Based on S-O-R (stimulus-organism-response) theory, we used donation contexts and donation amounts (stimuli) to induce psychological activity in the participants (organism) and then influence individual donation decision behaviors (response). Moreover, we applied psychological reactance (PR) theory to discuss the effect of donation context on decisions and the corresponding psychological process. The behavioral results showed that donation contexts (mandatory vs. voluntary) were significantly related to the donation amounts (i.e., less vs. more money that the charity received than money that the participants donated). At the ERP level, compared with mandatory donation, voluntary donation evoked a larger P2 amplitude when the charity received less money. In addition, a larger mean amplitude of LPP was elicited by voluntary donation compared to mandatory donation. This study provides practical implications for charity organizers to guide people to donate voluntarily.

Individual differences in emotion differentiation modulate electrocortical dynamics of cognitive reappraisal.

Cognitive reappraisal plays an important role in individuals' mental health and adaptation and depends on individual differences in emotion differentiation. However, it is unclear how individual differences in emotion differentiation modulate the electrocortical dynamics of cognitive reappraisal. To this end, we employed event-related potentials (ERPs) and source analysis to characterize temporal dynamics and cortical functions of cognitive reappraisal related with positive emotion differentiation. The electroencephalogram (EEG) data from 36 participants (aged 18-25years) were recorded when they were required to view neutral, pleasant emotional stimuli, or positively reappraise neutral emotional stimuli. Results showed that, compared with the individuals with low positive emotion differentiation, the individuals with high positive emotion differentiation presented larger late positive potential (LPP) amplitude enhancement during positive reappraisal. Source analysis further found that individuals with high positive emotion differentiation exhibited more activations in the middle frontal gyrus (Brodmann area [BA] 11), superior temporal gyrus (BA 38), and inferior frontal gurus (BA 47) when they implemented cognitive reappraisal as compared with their counterparts. Our findings deepen our understanding of the dynamic cortical organization of how positive emotion differentiation impacts cognitive reappraisal and informs cognitive reappraisal interventions for individuals with low emotion differentiation.

An Electrophysiological Abstractness Effect for Metaphorical Meaning Making.

Neuroimaging studies show that metaphors activate sensorimotor areas. These findings were interpreted as metaphors contributing to conceptual thought by mapping concrete, somatosensory information onto abstract ideas. But is sensorimotor information a necessary constituent of figurative meaning? The present study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) in a divided visual field paradigm with healthy adults to explore the role of sensorimotor feature processing in the comprehension of novel metaphors via the electrophysiological concreteness effect. Participants read French, novel adjective-noun expressions that were either metaphorical (“fat sentence”) or literal (“fat hip”). While literal expressions evoked a typical concreteness effect, an enhanced frontal negativity during right hemisphere (RH) as opposed to left hemisphere (LH) presentation, metaphors showed no such sign of sensorimotor feature processing. Relative to literals, they evoked a sustained frontal negativity during LH presentation and similar amplitudes during RH presentation, but both of these effects were the greater the more abstract the metaphors were. It is the first time such an electrophysiological abstractness effect is reported, just the opposite of a concreteness effect. It is particularly noteworthy that ERPs evoked by metaphors were not contingent on figurativeness, novelty, meaningfulness, imageability, emotional valence, or arousal, only on abstractness. When compared with similarly novel literal expressions, metaphors did not evoke a typical N400 and did not activate the RH either. The findings shed new light on the neurocognitive machinery of figurative meaning construction, pervasive in everyday communication. Contrary to embodied cognition, the conceptual system might be organized around abstract representations and not sensorimotor information, even for lush, metaphorical language.

Multiple identity tracking strategies vary by age: An ERP study

Top-down modulation underlies our ability to focus attention on task-relevant stimuli and ignore irrelevant distractions. Although age-related differences in neural correlates of top-down modulation have been investigated in multiple studies using variety of tasks (Gazzaley et al., 2005; Störmer et al., 2013), the effect of age on top-down modulation in a multiple identity tracking (MIT) task is still unknown. Thus, we investigated age-related differences in the MIT task by employing event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants tracked ten uniquely colored disks, two of which were randomly designated as targets at the beginning of each trial; the targets moved among four stationary distractors (serving as ERP baseline) and four moving distractors. Each type of stimulus was probed during the trial to capture differential patterns of brain activation. Tracking performance was similar across age groups. ERP data showed that younger adults performed the MIT task by enhancing the unique identities associated with targets relative to distractors through feature-based tracking. Older adults showed a pattern of distractor suppression engaging both location- and feature-based tracking strategies. Thus, our findings suggest that compared to younger adults, older adults engage greater levels of neural activity to achieve the same level of performance. These findings are discussed in light of theories of cognitive aging.

The influence of spatial frequency content on facial expression processing: An ERP study using rapid serial visual presentation

Spatial frequency (SF) contents have been shown to play an important role in emotion perception. This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the time course of neural dynamics involved in the processing of facial expression conveying specific SF information. Participants completed a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task, in which SF-filtered happy, fearful, and neutral faces were presented. The face-sensitive N170 component distinguished emotional (happy and fearful) faces from neutral faces in a low spatial frequency (LSF) condition, while only happy faces were distinguished from neutral faces in a high spatial frequency (HSF) condition. The later P3 component differentiated between the three types of emotional faces in both LSF and HSF conditions. Furthermore, LSF information elicited larger P1 amplitudes than did HSF information, while HSF information elicited larger N170 and P3 amplitudes than did LSF information. Taken together, these results suggest that emotion perception is selectively tuned to distinctive SF contents at different temporal processing stages.

Investigating the association between parity and the maternal neural response to infant cues

ABSTRACTUnderstanding the maternal neural response to infant affective cues has important implications for parent-child relationships. The current study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine patterns in mothers’ responses to infant affective cues, and evaluated the influence of maternal experience, defined by parity (i.e., the number of children a mother has) on ERP responses. Eighty-three mothers, three months postpartum, viewed photographs of displays of infant emotional faces (sad or happy) and listened to infant cries of different distress levels and a control tone. Maternal neural response was modulated by the emotional content of the auditory stimulus, as indexed by the N100 amplitude and latency. However, response to infant faces was not modulated by the emotional content of the stimuli as indexed by the N170. Neither N100 nor N170 were affected by parity. Maternal engagement with auditory stimuli, as indexed by the P300, was modulated by the emotional content of the cry and was affected by parity. A similar parity effect was observed for the P300 response to infant faces. Results suggest that parity may play an important role at later stages of maternal infant cue perception.

The effects of early institutionalization on emotional face processing: evidence for sparing via an experience-dependent mechanism.

Early psychosocial deprivation has profound adverse effects on children's brain and behavioural development, including abnormalities in physical growth, intellectual function, social cognition, and emotional development. Nevertheless, the domain of emotional face processing has appeared in previous research to be relatively spared; here, we test for possible sleeper effects emerging in early adolescence. This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the neural correlates of facial emotion processing in 12-year-old children who took part in a randomized controlled trial of foster care as an intervention for early institutionalization. Results revealed no significant group differences in two face and emotion-sensitive ERP components (P1 and N170), nor any association with age at placement or per cent of lifetime spent in an institution. These results converged with previous evidence from this population supporting relative sparing of facial emotion processing. We hypothesize that this sparing is due to an experience-dependent mechanism in which the amount of exposure to faces and facial expressions of emotion children received was sufficient to meet the low threshold required for cortical specialization of structures critical to emotion processing. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Early psychosocial deprivation leads to profoundly detrimental effects on children's brain and behavioural development. With respect to children's emotional face processing abilities, few adverse effects of institutionalized rearing have previously been reported. Recent studies suggest that 'sleeper effects' may emerge many years later, especially in the domain of face processing. What does this study add? Examining a cumulative 12years of data, we found only minimal group differences and no evidence of a sleeper effect in this particular domain. These findings identify emotional face processing as a unique ability in which relative sparing can be found. We propose an experience-dependent mechanism in which the amount of social interaction children received met the low threshold required for cortical specialization.

Face-body integration of intense emotional expressions of victory and defeat.

Human facial expressions can be recognized rapidly and effortlessly. However, for intense emotions from real life, positive and negative facial expressions are difficult to discriminate and the judgment of facial expressions is biased towards simultaneously perceived body expressions. This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neural dynamics involved in the integration of emotional signals from facial and body expressions of victory and defeat. Emotional expressions of professional players were used to create pictures of face-body compounds, with either matched or mismatched emotional expressions in faces and bodies. Behavioral results showed that congruent emotional information of face and body facilitated the recognition of facial expressions. ERP data revealed larger P1 amplitudes for incongruent compared to congruent stimuli. Also, a main effect of body valence on the P1 was observed, with enhanced amplitudes for the stimuli with losing compared to winning bodies. The main effect of body expression was also observed in N170 and N2, with winning bodies producing larger N170/N2 amplitudes. In the later stage, a significant interaction of congruence by body valence was found on the P3 component. Winning bodies elicited lager P3 amplitudes than losing bodies did when face and body conveyed congruent emotional signals. Beyond the knowledge based on prototypical facial and body expressions, the results of this study facilitate us to understand the complexity of emotion evaluation and categorization out of laboratory.

Electrophysiological mechanisms of biased response to smoking-related cues in young smokers

Cigarette smoking during young adult may result in serious health issues in later life. Hence, it is extremely necessary to study the smoking neurophysiological mechanisms in this critical transitional period. However, few studies revealed the electrophysiological mechanisms of cognitive processing biases in young adult smokers. In present study, nineteen young smokers with 12h abstinent and 19 matched nonsmokers were recruited. By employing event-related potentials (ERP) measurements during a smoking cue induced craving task, electrophysiological brain responses were compared between the young adult smokers and nonsmokers. The Slow Positive Wave (SPW) amplitude of smoking-related cues was enhanced in young adult smokers compared with nonsmokers. In addition, increased P300/SPW component of smoking-related cues relative to neutral cues were found in young adult smokers. Meanwhile, a positive correlation between Cigarette Per Day (CPD) and the amplitude of ERPs wave (P300/SPW) at anterior (Fz), central (Cz) were observed in young adult smokers. Our findings provided direct electrophysiological evidence for the cognitive processing bias of smoking cue and may shed new insights into the smoking behavior in young adult smokers.

Inhibition control impairments in adolescent smokers: electrophysiological evidence from a Go/NoGo study.

Smoking during adolescence may promote nicotine dependence later on in life. Therefore, it is extremely important to study the neural mechanisms of adolescent smokers. As inhibition control is emphasized in several contemporary theoretical models of addiction, in the current study, we focused on the electrophysiological evidence of inhibition control deficits in adolescent smokers. By using relatively homogenous groups of adolescent smokers (n=18) and matched nonsmokers (n=18), we employed event-related potentials (ERP) to investigate the N200 and P300 amplitude and latency differences during a Go/NoGo task between the adolescent smokers and nonsmokers. Relative to nonsmokers, more NoGo response errors, reduced NoGo P300 amplitude, and longer P300 latency were observed in adolescent smokers. Correlation analysis revealed that the NoGo P300 amplitudes were significantly correlated with NoGo errors in both adolescent smokers and nonsmokers. Our findings provided direct electrophysiological evidence for inhibitory control impairments in adolescent smokers. It is hoped that our results may enhance understanding of the pathology of inhibitory control in adolescent smokers.

The subliminal affective priming effects of faces displaying various levels of arousal: An ERP study

This study on the subliminal affective priming effects of faces displaying various levels of arousal employed event-related potentials (ERPs). The participants were asked to rate the arousal of ambiguous medium-arousing faces that were preceded by high- or low-arousing priming faces presented subliminally. The results revealed that the participants exhibited arousal-consistent variation in their arousal level ratings of the probe faces exclusively in the negative prime condition. Compared with high-arousing faces, the low-arousing faces tended to elicit greater late positive component (LPC, 450–660ms) and greater N400 (330–450ms) potentials. These findings support the following conclusions: (1) the effect of subliminal affective priming of faces can be detected in the affective arousal dimension; (2) valence may influence the subliminal affective priming effect of the arousal dimension of emotional stimuli; and (3) the subliminal affective priming effect of face arousal occurs when the prime stimulus affects late-stage processing of the probe.

The duration of disgusted and fearful faces is judged longer and shorter than that of neutral faces: the attention-related time distortions as revealed by behavioral and electrophysiological measurements.

Time perception has been shown to be altered by emotions. This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the effects of two threat-related emotions on the judgment of time intervals in the range of 490–910 ms. We demonstrated that disgust and fear have distinct influences on time perception. At the behavioral level, disgusted faces were estimated longer and fearful faces were estimated shorter (i.e., the generalization gradient for the disgusted faces was shifted left while the generalization gradient for the fearful faces was shifted right) when compared with neutral faces. Accordingly, the contingent negative variation, an online ERP index of timing, displayed larger area in disgust and smaller area in fear conditions when compared with neutral condition (disgust = 1.94 ± 2.35 μV•s, neutral = 1.40 ± 2.5 μV•s, and fear = 1.00 ± 2.26 μV•s). These findings indicated that specific neural mechanisms may underlie the attention effects of different subtypes of threat-related emotions on timing; compared with neutral faces, fearful faces are likely to attract more attentional resources while disgusted faces may attract less attentional resources for emotional processing. The major contribution of the current study is to provide neural correlates of fear vs. disgust divergence in the aspect of time perception and to demonstrate beyond the behavioral level that the categorization of threat-related emotions should be refined so to highlight the adaptability of the human defense system.

Neural measures of social attention across the first years of life: Characterizing typical development and markers of autism risk

Few studies employing event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine infant perception/cognition have systematically characterized age-related changes over the first few years of life. Establishing a ‘normative’ template of development is important in its own right, and doing so may also better highlight points of divergence for high-risk populations of infants, such as those at elevated genetic risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The present investigation explores the developmental progression of the P1, N290, P400 and Nc components for a large sample of young children between 6 and 36 months of age, addressing age-related changes in amplitude, sensitivity to familiar and unfamiliar stimuli and hemispheric lateralization. Two samples of infants are included: those at low- and high-risk for ASD. The four components of interest show differential patterns of change over time and hemispheric lateralization; however, infants at low- and high-risk for ASD do not show significant differences in patterns of neural response to faces. These results will provide a useful point of reference for future developmental cognitive neuroscience research targeting both typical development and vulnerable populations.

Sex-Differences of Face Coding: Evidence from Larger Right Hemispheric M170 in Men and Dipole Source Modelling

The processing of faces relies on a specialized neural system comprising bilateral cortical structures with a dominance of the right hemisphere. However, due to inconsistencies of earlier findings as well as more recent results such functional lateralization has become a topic of discussion. In particular, studies employing behavioural tasks and electrophysiological methods indicate a dominance of the right hemisphere during face perception only in men whereas women exhibit symmetric and bilateral face processing. The aim of this study was to further investigate such sex differences in hemispheric processing of personally familiar and opposite-sex faces using whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG). We found a right-lateralized M170-component in occipito-temporal sensor clusters in men as opposed to a bilateral response in women. Furthermore, the same pattern was obtained in performing dipole localization and determining dipole strength in the M170-timewindow. These results suggest asymmetric involvement of face-responsive neural structures in men and allow to ascribe this asymmetry to the fusiform gyrus. This specifies findings from previous investigations employing event-related potentials (ERP) and LORETA reconstruction methods yielding rather extended bilateral activations showing left asymmetry in women and right lateralization in men. We discuss our finding of an asymmetric fusiform activation pattern in men in terms of holistic face processing during face evaluation and sex differences with regard to visual strategies in general and interest for opposite faces in special. Taken together the pattern of hemispheric specialization observed here yields new insights into sex differences in face perception and entails further questions about interactions between biological sex, psychological gender and influences that might be stimulus-driven or task dependent.

Reward Associations Reduce Behavioral Interference by Changing the Temporal Dynamics of Conflict Processing

Associating stimuli with the prospect of reward typically facilitates responses to those stimuli due to an enhancement of attentional and cognitive-control processes. Such reward-induced facilitation might be especially helpful when cognitive-control mechanisms are challenged, as when one must overcome interference from irrelevant inputs. Here, we investigated the neural dynamics of reward effects in a color-naming Stroop task by employing event-related potentials (ERPs). We found that behavioral facilitation in potential-reward trials, as compared to no-reward trials, was paralleled by early ERP modulations likely indexing increased attention to the reward-predictive stimulus. Moreover, reward changed the temporal dynamics of conflict-related ERP components, which may be a consequence of an early access to the various stimulus features and their relationships. Finally, although word meanings referring to potential-reward colors were always task-irrelevant, they caused greater interference compared to words referring to no-reward colors, an effect that was accompanied by a relatively early fronto-central ERP modulation. This latter observation suggests that task-irrelevant reward information can undermine goal-directed behavior at an early processing stage, presumably reflecting priming of a goal-incompatible response. Yet, these detrimental effects of incongruent reward-related words were absent in potential-reward trials, apparently due to the prioritized processing of task-relevant reward information. Taken together, the present data demonstrate that reward associations can influence conflict processing by changing the temporal dynamics of stimulus processing and subsequent cognitive-control mechanisms.

The Cognitive Mechanism and Neural Bases of Statistical Learning*

In this review,we mainly discuss the origin and the development of statistical learning research,as well as constraints and brain neural bases of statistical learning.Researches of statistical learning originated from the studies on speech segmentation in human infants since 1990's.From then on,lots of studies have explored statistical learning on both non-linguistic continuous sound streams and visual shape sequences.Evidence from these researches suggest that statistical learning is involved in discovering and extracting regularities,and it is domain-general.However,statistical learning in different domains is constrained by domain-related factors.For example,statistical learning in language(s) is constrained by language-specific factors;while non-linguistic statistical learning is constrained by stimulus characteristics and presentation modality.In recent years,several studies have examined the temporal course of statistical learning by employing event-related potentials(ERPs) technique and investigated its neural substrates by using functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) technique.ERPs studies consistently found that a negative ERP component at around 400 ms was related with the extraction of regularities,and findings of fMRI studies suggested that statistical learning mainly involved left superior temporal gyrus,right striatum and right medial temporal memory system.

Can Intervention Programs Influence How the Dyslexic Brain Processes Low-Level Visual Stimuli?

This preliminary study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine the effect of different intervention programs for dyslexia. Two intervention programs were used; the CogniFit Personal Coach (CPC) and the Reading Acceleration Program (RAP). Differences between a small group of dyslexic readers and a control group of regular readers were examined on two visual oddball tasks. The two oddball tasks included a non-alphabetic task and a non-contextual alphabetic one. The amplitude and latency of ERP component P1 is reported here, showing a decrease in amplitude and an increase in latency after training, suggesting an amplitude-latency tradeoff after visual training.

Affective facial expression processing in young children who have experienced maltreatment during the first year of life: An event-related potential study

This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neural correlates of facial affect processing in maltreated and nonmaltreated children at 42 months of age. ERPs elicited while children passively viewed standardized pictures of female models posing angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions were examined, and differences between maltreated (N = 46) and nonmaltreated (N = 25) children were reported. Three occipital components (P1, N170, and P400) and four frontal-central components (N150, P240, Nc, and a positive slow wave [PSW]) were identified. Findings revealed that maltreated children had greater P1 and P400 amplitude in response to angry facial affect compared to other emotions, and compared to nonmaltreated children. N170 amplitude was greater in response to happy compared to angry in the maltreated group. For the P240 component, maltreated children had greater amplitude in response to angry facial expressions relative to happy, whereas children in the nonmaltreated group had greater P240 amplitude in response to happy relative to angry facial affect. Further, the nonmaltreated group had greater PSW amplitude in response to angry facial affect, whereas those in the maltreated group showed greater PSW amplitude to happy facial expressions. The results provided further support for the hypothesis that the experience of maltreatment and the predominantly negative emotional tone in maltreating families alters the functioning of neural systems associated with the identification and processing of facial emotion. These results exemplify the importance of early preventive interventions focused on emotion for children who have experienced maltreatment early in life.