ERP Study Research Articles

Electrophysiological correlates of stuttering severity: An ERP study

Although a variety of theories have been proposed to explain the etiology of stuttering, the exact neurological origin of it is still uncertain. The aim of this study is to investigate the correlation between stuttering severity and ERP measures. The population of this study consisted of 12 adults with moderate, 12 adults with severe stuttering, and 12 fluent speakers as the control group. ERPs were recorded during an auditory task in which subjects should determine an oddball stimulus. The result of mismatch negativity (MMN) amplitude analysis revealed significant differences between severe stuttering and fluent speakers groups and between two stuttering groups. Moreover, the result showed significant differences between the three study groups for P300 amplitude. The findings of the present study suggest that the differences in ERP components are existed not only between people who stutter and fluent speakers but also between people with different levels of stuttering severity.

Capacity limits in sentence comprehension: Evidence from dual-task judgements and event-related potentials

There is an ongoing controversy over whether readers can access the meaning of multiple words, simultaneously. To date, different experimental methods have generated seemingly contradictory evidence in support of serial or parallel processing accounts. For example, dual-task studies suggest that readers can process a maximum of one word at a time (White, Palmer & Boynton, 2018), while ERP studies have demonstrated neural priming effects that are more consistent with parallel activation (Wen, Snell & Grainger, 2019). To help reconcile these views, I measured neural responses and behavioral accuracy in a dual-task sentence comprehension paradigm. Participants saw masked sentences and two-word phrases and had to judge whether or not they were grammatical. Grammatically correct sentences (This girl is neat) produced smaller N400 responses compared to scrambled sentences (Those girl is fled): an N400 sentence superiority effect. Critically, participants' grammaticality judgements on the same trials showed striking capacity limitations, with dual-task deficits closely matching the predictions of a serial, all-or-none processing account. Together, these findings suggest that the N400 sentence superiority effect is fully compatible with serial word recognition, and that readers are unable to process multiple sentence positions simultaneously.

Impairment of semantic composition in schizophrenia: An ERP study with lexical stimuli

The ability of taking advantage of contextual constraints to facilitate semantic composition is impaired in schizophrenia, especially when control demands are high. This study examined the deficit using a primed lexical decision task with low control demands. Furthermore, two types of two-character Chinese words, binding nouns and compound nouns representing different levels of compositional difficulty, were employed to explore processing differences between schizophrenic (N = 35) and healthy (N = 18) participants. With the initial character of each word serving as the prime (context), participants judged as quickly and accurately as possible whether the final character, presented subsequently (SOA = 1000 ms) as the target, could combine and form a real word. Analyses of the N400 effect indicated that, even when integrating a one-character target into a one-character context, schizophrenic patients demonstrated lower efficiency than healthy controls, possibly due to deficiency in sustained attention and memory maintenance. However, their sensitivity to different levels of compositional difficulty seemed to be preserved. Specifically, as the initial characters of binding nouns could generate strong expectancies for their respective final characters, there was a processing advantage (greater N400 effect) of binding nouns over compound nouns, which was observed in both healthy and schizophrenic participants. Implications for the mechanisms underlying impairment of semantic composition in schizophrenia are discussed.

Moral judgments by individuals with psychopathic traits: An ERP study

Moral judgments by individuals with psychopathic traits: An ERP study

The Neural Responses of Visual Complexity in the Oddball Paradigm: An ERP Study

This research measured human neural responses to images of different visual complexity levels using the oddball paradigm to explore the neurocognitive responses of complexity perception in visual processing. In the task, 24 participants (12 females) were required to react to images with high complexity for all stimuli. We hypothesized that high-complexity stimuli would induce early visual and attentional processing effects and may elicit the visual mismatch negativity responses and the emergence of error-related negativity. Our results showed that the amplitude of P1 and N1 were unaffected by complexity in the early visual processing. Under the target stimuli, both N2 and P3b components were reported, suggesting that the N2 component was sensitive to the complexity deviation, and the attentional processing related to complexity may be derived from the occipital zone according to the feature of the P3b component. In addition, compared with the low-complexity stimulus, the high-complexity stimulus aroused a larger amplitude of the visual mismatch negativity. The detected error negativity (Ne) component reflected the error detection of the participants’ mismatch between visual complexity and psychological expectations.

The role of sex and emotion on emotion perception in artificial faces: An ERP study

Sex has a significant impact on the perception of emotional expressions. However, it remains unclear whether sex influences the perception of emotions in artificial faces, which are becoming popular in emotion research. We used an emotion recognition task with FaceGen faces portraying six basic emotions aiming to investigate the effect of sex and emotion on behavioural and electrophysiological parameters. 71 participants performed the task while EEG was recorded. The recognition of sadness was the poorest, however, females recognized sadness better than males. ERP results indicated that fear, disgust, and anger evoked higher amplitudes of late positive potential over the left parietal region compared to neutral expression. Females demonstrated higher values of global field power as compared to males. The interaction between sex and emotion on ERPs was not significant. The results of our study may be valuable for future therapies and research, as it emphasizes possibly distinct processing of emotions and potential sex differences in the recognition of emotional expressions in FaceGen faces.

Native language experience shapes pre-attentive foreign tone processing and guides rapid memory trace build-up: An ERP study.

Language experience, particularly from our native language (L1), shapes our perception of other languages around us. The present study examined how L1 experience moulds the initial processing of foreign (L2) tone during acquisition. In particular, we investigated whether learners were able to rapidly forge new neural memory traces for novel tonal words, which was tracked by recording learners’ ERP responses during two word acquisition sessions. We manipulated the degree of L1–L2 familiarity by comparing learners with a nontonal L1 (German) and a tonal L1 (Swedish) and by using tones that were similar (fall) or dissimilar (high, low, rise) to those occurring in Swedish. Our results indicate that a rapid, pre‐attentive memory trace build‐up for tone manifests in an early ERP component at ~50 ms but only at particularly high levels of L1–L2 similarity. Specifically, early processing was facilitated for an L2 tone that had a familiar pitch shape (fall) and word‐level function (inflection). This underlines the importance of these L1 properties for the early processing of L2 tone. In comparison, a later anterior negativity related to the processing of the tones’ grammatical content was unaffected by native language experience but was instead influenced by lexicality, pitch prominence, entrenchment, and successful learning. Behaviorally, learning effects emerged for all learners and tone types, regardless of L1–L2 familiarity or pitch prominence. Together, the findings suggest that while L1‐based facilitation effects occur, they mainly affect early processing stages and do not necessarily result in more successful L2 acquisition at behavioral level.

ERP Analysis Using a Multi-Channel Matching Pursuit Algorithm.

In this study, we propose a new algorithm for analysing event-related components observed in EEG signals in psychological experiments. We investigate its capabilities and limitations. The algorithm is based on multivariate matching pursuit and clustering. It is aimed to find patterns in EEG signals which are similar across different experimental conditions, but it allows for variations in amplitude and slight variability in topography. The method proved to yield expected results in numerical simulations. For the real data coming from an emotional categorisation task experiment, we obtained two indications. First, the method can be used as a specific filter that reduces the variability of components, as defined classically, within each experimental condition. Second, equivalent dipoles fitted to items of the activity clusters identified by the algorithm localise in compact brain areas related to the task performed by the subjects across experimental conditions. Thus this activity may be studied as candidates for hypothetical latent components. The proposed algorithm is a promising new tool in ERP studies, which deserves further experimental evaluations.

Variability in native and nonnative language: An ERP study of semantic and grammar processing

AbstractThis study examined individual-level variability in N400 and P600 ERP correlates of native and nonnative language sentence processing of semantic and grammar information. Twenty-six native English-speaking learners of Spanish as a second language were tested. Participants completed sentence reading tasks in English and Spanish during EEG recording. The group-level results for grammar showed P600s in the native and nonnative language. For semantics, there was an N400 only in the native language. Individual-level ERP patterns revealed that, for native language semantics, about two thirds of participants showed N400s, but approximately one-third showed P600s. For native language grammar, approximately one third of participants exhibited N400s instead of P600s. Individual-level ERPs showed similar variability in the nonnative language for semantics and grammar, and N400/P600 variability in Spanish related to Spanish verbal fluency and grammar knowledge. This contributes knowledge of how nonnative and native language neurocognition compare regarding the processing routes that individuals use during comprehension.

Differences in Emotional Conflict Processing between High and Low Mindfulness Adolescents: An ERP Study.

Mindfulness is a state of concentration that allows individuals to focus on their feelings and thoughts without judgment. However, little is known regarding the underlying neural processes of mindfulness. This study used ERPs to investigate the differences between high and low trait mindfulness adolescents during emotional conflict processing. Nineteen low mindfulness adolescents (LMSs) and sixteen high mindfulness adolescent (HMSs) individuals were asked to complete a face Stroop task. The task superimposed emotional words on emotional faces to generate congruent (CC) and incongruent (IC) conditions. Continuous electroencephalogram data were recorded during the face Stroop task. Results revealed that for N450, the interaction of congruency and group was significant. The incongruent trials evoked a larger N450 than the congruent trials in the HMSs, whereas there were no significant differences between the two conditions in the LMSs. There were significant main effects of congruency for SP (slow potential). The incongruent trials evoked a larger SP than the congruent trials. The results suggest that mindfulness may only affect early conflict monitoring rather than later conflict resolution. The findings expand the neural basis of the effect of mindfulness on inhibitory control.

DLPFC controls the rapid neural response to visual threat: An ERP and rTMS study

Individuals are faster at detecting threatening stimuli than neutral stimuli. While generally considered a rapid bottom-up response, this threat superiority effect is also modulated by top-down mechanisms known to rely on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). What remains unclear is whether the response is modulated only at later stages of processing, or whether rapid attention to threat itself is controlled in a top-down manner. To test this, we used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to inhibit activity in the DLPFC, and measured EEG to index the immediate neural response to threat. Twenty participants attended two sessions where they performed a visual search task with threatening or neutral targets. Prior to this, they received 15 min of 1 Hz inhibitory or sham rTMS targeting the right DLPFC. We measured the impact of rTMS on the P1, a rapid visually-evoked potential that is modulated by attention. We found that threatening targets increased the amplitude of the P1 in the sham condition, but inhibition of the DLPFC abolished this increase. These results suggest that the neural signature of rapid attentional detection of threat, even at its earliest stage, is influenced in a top-down fashion by the right DLPFC.

The effect of the degree and location of danger in traffic hazard perception: an ERP study

The aim of this study is to explore the influence of the degree and location of the danger of traffic hazards on the neural reaction process. 26 automobile drivers were asked to look at the pictures and press buttons on the pictures unrelated to traffic. Electroencephalography responses to traffic-related images were recorded and analyzed. It was found that danger in the central visual region induced a larger amplitude of the N100 component than in the peripheral visual region and the trend of different hazard levels was consistent. The danger in the central visual area also induced a larger amplitude of the P200 component than in the peripheral vision area. In addition, when the danger appeared in the central visual area (0°), the P200 amplitude induced by the low-hazard situation was smaller than that of the high-hazard situation. When the danger appeared in the peripheral visual area (7°), the P200 amplitude induced by the low-hazard situation was larger than that of the high-hazard situation. Finally, the presence of danger evoked a larger amplitude of the P300 component in the peripheral visual area than in the central visual area and the P300 amplitude was larger in the low-hazard situation than in the high-hazard situation. The results suggest that hazards are more easily processed in the central visual area during the early stage of automatic perception. In the later hazard evaluation stage, the hazard in the central visual area and the high-hazard situation were more easily processed.

On the role of item encoding mechanisms in associative memory in young and older adults: A mass univariate ERP study

We examined the role of item encoding mechanisms in older adults’ disproportionate deficit in memory for associations and individual differences therein. Young and older adults encoded sequentially presented object pairs via interactive imagery while their EEG was recorded. Compared to the young adults, older adults exhibited a reduction in associative, but not in item memory performance. Young adults showed frontal slow wave subsequent memory effects (SME) in both an item encoding contrast and an associative encoding contrast, presumably reflecting elaborative item processing, as well as the elaboration of an internal interactive image. Based on their performance in the subsequent associative memory test, older adults were subdivided into a high and a low performing group. In low performers, instead of a frontal slow wave SME a polarity-reversed, early parietal item SME was prominent, whose magnitude was negatively correlated with associative memory performance, potentially reflecting shallow, perceptual item encoding processes that are not well-suited for the formation of new associations. The present findings suggest that age-related deficits in elaboration of item information and an emphasis on the encoding of perceptual, item-specific details may contribute to reduced associative memory performance in older adults.

Emotional processing prospectively modulates the impact of anxiety on COVID-19 pandemic-related post-traumatic stress symptoms: an ERP study

BackgroundConsidering that the elevated distress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, in some cases, led to post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), it has been proposed as a specific traumatic event. The present longitudinal study investigated pre-pandemic motivated attention to emotional stimuli, as indexed by Late Positive Potential (LPP) amplitude, in relation with the potential differential role of anxiety and depressive symptoms in predicting PTSS severity related to the COVID-19 pandemic. MethodsA total of 79 university students initially completed self-report measures of depression and anxiety along with a passive viewing task of emotional (pleasant, unpleasant) and neutral pictures while electroencephaloghic activity was recorded. In December 2020, 57 participants completed a questionnaire assessing PTSS. ResultsSignificant interactions between anxiety and LPP emerged in predicting pandemic-related PTSS, where greater anxiety symptoms predicted PTSS only in individuals with greater LPP to unpleasant or with reduced LPP to pleasant stimuli. LimitationsThe prevalence of the female sex, the relatively young age of the participants, as well as the fact that they were all enrolled in a University course might not allow the generalization of the findings. ConclusionsTaken together, the present longitudinal study provided novel evidence on EEG predictors of pandemic-related PTSS that might be useful for the prevention and treatment of PTSS. Indeed, assessing anxiety symptoms and pre-trauma LPP to emotional stimuli might be a useful target for identifying individuals that are more vulnerable to the development of PTSS during times of crisis.

Am I really seeing what’s around me? An ERP study on social anxiety under speech induction, uncertainty and social feedback

Cognitive models of social anxiety propose that socially anxious individuals engage in excessive self-focusing attention when entering a social situation. In the present study, speech anxiety was induced to socially anxious and control participants. Event-related potentials were recorded while participants performed a perceptual judgement task using distinct or ambiguous stimuli, before and after social feedback. Disputed feedback led to more revisions and decreased levels of confidence, especially among socially anxious individuals. Prior feedback, greater occipital P1 amplitudes in both groups for ambiguous probes indicated heightened sensory facilitation to ambiguous information, and greater anterior N1 amplitudes for ambiguous stimuli in highly anxious participants suggested anticipation of negative feedback in this group. Post-feedback, P1, N1 and LPP amplitudes were reduced overall among socially anxious individuals indicating a reduction in sensory facilitation of visual information. These results suggest excessive self-focusing among socially anxious individuals, possibly linked to anticipation of an anxiety-provoking social situation.

The influence of concreteness on emotional nouns valence processing: An ERP study

<p id="p00010">Rapid responses to emotional words play a considerable role in human social communication. It has been reported that individuals have an advantage to process emotional words in comparison with neutral words. While it is crucial to distinguish between words that convey concrete concepts and abstract concepts in emotional words processing, because many studies have found that concrete words (e.g., “desk”) are processed more quickly and efficiently than abstract words (e.g., “truth”), which is termed as the concreteness effects. However, much is known about the representation and processing of concrete concepts, our understanding of abstract concepts is limited, and the way in which abstract concepts are represented has received a great deal of research interest. Recent research has found an “abstractness effect”, that is, a processing advantage of abstract words over concrete words, suggesting the role of affective information in the representation of abstract concepts. <break/>In the present study, we distinguished emotional nouns into concrete concepts and abstract concepts to explore potential differences in processing, as measured by event-related potentials. A dual-target RSVP task was employed to explore the processing stages of concrete and abstract nouns in the limited attention context. A total of 24 right-handed participants (8 males) aged from 18 to 30 years old took part in this study in exchange for payment. Brain electrical activity was recorded by a 64-channel system composing of tin electrodes mounted in an elastic cap according to the international 10-20 System. In addition to behavioral responses, P1, N170, and LPC components were selected as indicators of early and late processing stages of emotional nouns. <break/>The behavioral results showed that there was no concreteness effect or abstractness effect of emotional nouns in the context of limited attentional resources, while it reflected a “negative bias” for emotion effect. ERP results suggested N170 component was modulated by emotion valence and concreteness, that emotional nouns elicited significantly larger N170 amplitude than neutral nouns, and concrete nouns elicited significantly larger N170 amplitude than abstract nouns. Above two modulation patterns of N170 component were observed in the left hemisphere, but not in the right hemisphere. LPC component was also modulated by emotion valence and concreteness, that emotional nouns elicited significantly LPC amplitude than neutral nouns, while in contrast to previous studies, concrete nouns elicited significantly larger LPC amplitude than abstract nouns, which might reflect the attention resource allocation or the effect of emotional information on concreteness effect. Last but not least, there was an interaction effect between concreteness and emotion valence, that positive, negative, and neutral of abstract nouns could be distinguished by LPC amplitude respectively, while it could only differentiate emotional concrete nouns from non-emotional nouns. The late stage of emotional noun processing was in accordance with the abstractness effect. <break/>Emotion valence and concreteness both modulate the ERP components in the early and late stages of noun processing in the limited attention context. In the late processing stage, LPC amplitude distinguishing abstract nouns with different valence, which indicates that abstract nouns had more emotional valence than concrete nouns, and provides electrophysiological evidence for the view that abstract words contain more emotional information.

Implicit emotion regulation improves arithmetic performance: An ERP study.

Available evidence suggests that emotions influence arithmetic, and explicit emotion regulation modulates the effect of anxiety on arithmetic performance. However, neural mechanisms by which implicit emotion regulation affects these phenomena remain unclear, particularly under distinct affective priming contexts. Twenty-two college students were required to perform multiple tasks in sequence, including an idioms matching task, a multiplication computational estimation task (MCE task), an emotion judgement task (EJ task), and an emotion assessment task (EA task). Behavioral performance was measured via accuracy and response time during the MCE task, and ratings of the EA task, while eletrophysiological response was measured via the contingent negative variation (CNV) elicited by completing the MCE task. Decreased response time and emotional intensity ratings were observed for priming emotion regulation idioms compared to priming neutral idioms. Priming emotion regulation idioms attenuated early CNV amplitudes under happiness priming, and attenuated both early and late CNV amplitudes under fear priming. These results suggested that implicit reappraisal and suppression are promising strategies to enhance arithmetic performance and alleviate the adverse effects of affective priming, especially under fear priming.

The interplay between classifier choice and animacy in Mandarin-Chinese noun phrases: an ERP study

ABSTRACT Animacy is an important semantic assignment principle in both gender and numeral classifier systems. Linguistic research has shown that animacy is not a simple binary feature but represents a fine-grained taxonomy of different animacy levels. We used the classifier system of Mandarin Chinese, with classifiers varying in semantic constraint, to assess whether the referents’ degree of animacy influences the processing of classifier-noun pairs. ERP results show an effect of agreement mismatch only when the general classifier 个 gè is paired with nouns referring to higher animals (chimpanzee, lion). For these pairs, the sortal classifier 只 zhī has to be chosen. No such effect was observed for nouns that refer to intermediate-level and lower animals (octopus, earthworm), indicating that 个 gè does not constitute an agreement mismatch here. We also observed significant ERP effects indicating that speakers of Mandarin Chinese process the general classifier and the specific sortal classifiers differently.

An ERP study on the influence of mental abacus calculation on subthreshold arithmetic priming in children.

The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of mental abacus calculation training (MACT) on subliminal cognitive processes. Twenty children with intensive MACT (MACT group) and 20 children without MACT (non-MACT group) were selected. The two groups of children were matched in age, sex, handedness and academic grade. The participants were tested with subthreshold arithmetic priming task while their neural activities were recorded with a 32-channel electroencephalogram system. We found that MACT changed the subliminal cognitive mechanism of computational processing, speeding up the computation. MACT affected the computational processing mode. Specifically, in the identification stage, both groups of children adopted the visual space processing mode, while in the computing stage, the MACT group adopted a visual space processing mode, but the non-MACT group adopted a semantic processing mode. Moreover, MACT improved children's executive functions. These results yielded insights into the effect of early abacus training on children's cognitive processing, providing a theoretical basis for the development and promotion of abacus training.

First and second languages differentially affect rationality when making decisions: An ERP study

The present study examined how decision-making is affected by first (L1) and second languages (L2), emotion, and cognitive load. In a cross-task study, 30 Chinese-English bilinguals were asked to implement lexical-semantic judgment and gambling task. The results showed that after lexical decisions under high cognitive load, P3 was more positive for negative words than for neutral words in L1. The reverse was the case in the L2 in which P3 was more positive for neutral words compared to negative words. Critically, under high cognitive load, as the P3 effect increased for negative words relative to neutral words, the rationality of the decisions after these negative words decreased in the L1 but increased in the L2. The results moreover revealed that the increased Granger causal strength predicted more rational choices in the L2 high-load negative condition. Altogether, the findings offer evidence of how L1s and L2s can differentially influence rational decision-making.