Event-related Potential Experiment Research Articles

Statistical evaluation of recurrence quantification analysis applied on single trial evoked potential studies

ObjectiveWe evaluated the potential of recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) to improve the analysis of trial-by-trial-variability in event-related potentials (ERPs) experiments. MethodsWe use an acoustic oddball paradigm to compare the efficiency of RQA with a linear amplitude based analysis of single trial ERPs with regard to the power to distinguish responses to different tone types. We further probed the robustness of both analyses towards structured noise induced by parallel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). ResultsRQA provided robust discrimination of responses to different tone types, even when EEG data were contaminated by structured noise. Yet, its power to discriminate responses to different tone types was not significantly superior to a linear amplitude analysis. RQA measures were only moderately correlated with EEG amplitudes, suggesting that RQA may extract additional information from single trial responses not detected by amplitude evaluation. ConclusionsRQA allows quantifying signal characteristics of single trial ERPs measured with and without noise induced by parallel MRI. RQA power to discriminate responses to different tone types was similar to linear amplitude based analysis. SignificanceRQA has the potential to detect differences of signal features in response to a standard oddball paradigm and provide additional trial-by-trial information compared to classical amplitude based analysis.

An Event-Related Potentials Study of Mental Rotation in Identifying Chemical Structural Formulas

<p style="text-align:justify">The purpose of this study was to investigate how mental rotation strategies affect the identification of chemical structural formulas. This study conducted event-related potentials (ERPs) experiments. In addition to the data collected in the ERPs, a Chemical Structure Conceptual Questionnaire and interviews were also administered for data collection. Eighteen university students majoring in chemistry were recruited. In the ERP experiments, the participants were required to identify 2D figures, 2D chemical structural formulas, 3D objects and 3D chemical structural formulas. The contours of 2D figures are similar to those of 2D chemical structural formulas, but they contain no content knowledge. Likewise, the contours of 3D objects are similar to 3D chemical structural formulas without content knowledge. The results showed that all students used similar strategies of mental rotation in identifying 2D figures, 3D objects and 3D chemical structural formulas. However, the high-achieving students used different strategies in identifying 2D figures and chemical structural formulas, while the low-achieving students tended to use similar strategies of mental rotation in identifying both 2D figures and chemical structural formulas. The results indicate that some of the difficulties in identifying 2D chemical structural formulas that students encounter are due to their inappropriate strategies of mental rotation.</p>

Electrophysiological evidence of categorical perception of Chinese lexical tones in attentive condition

Previous electrophysiological evidence supports categorical perception of Chinese lexical tones at the preattentive stage (Xi and colleagues). In this study, we examined participants' attentive responses to tonal continua in an event-related potential experiment that recorded their N2b and P3b oddball responses. We found that for both the N2b and the P3b component, the responses elicited by the within-category deviants were similar in the left and the right recording sites. However, the across-category deviants elicited larger responses in the left recording sites than in the right sites, reflecting conscious phonological processing of lexical tones. These results provide electrophysiological correlates of categorical perception of Chinese lexical tones in later stages associated with controlled processes.

Object and spatial visualizers have different object-processing patterns

Both behavioral and neurophysiological evidence shows the advantage of object visualizers in object-related tasks relative to spatial visualizers. It is still unclear, in which stage the advantage appears. In this study, a behavioral experiment revealed that spatial visualizers' performance decreased evidently from short delay to long delay in a high-load condition, but object visualizers performed stably. In addition, an event-related potential experiment found the slow cortical potentials for the spatial visualizer to be more negative in relation to object visualizers in the 1800-3800 ms stage, although spatial visualizers performed worse than the object visualizers. Therefore, the processing advantage of object visualizers, which is caused by the higher neural efficiency of object visualizers than spatial visualizers in object tasks, seems to be at the retention stage rather than the encoding stage.

Prefrontal-Occipitoparietal Coupling Underlies Late Latency Human Neuronal Responses to Emotion

Enhanced late positive potentials (LPPs) evoked by highly arousing unpleasant and pleasant stimuli have been consistently observed in event-related potential experiments in humans. Although the psychological factors modulating the LPP have been studied in detail, the neurobiological underpinnings of this response remain poorly understood. Current models suggest that the LPP is a product of both an automatic facilitation of perceptual activity, as well as postperceptual processing under cognitive control. Here we applied magnetoencephalography (MEG) and beamformer analysis combined with Granger causality measures to provide a mechanistic account for LPP generation that reconciles these two models. We demonstrate that the magnetic homolog of the LPP, mLPP, is localized within bilateral occipitoparietal and right prefrontal cortex. Critically, directed functional connectivity analysis between these brain regions, indexed by Granger causality, demonstrates stronger bidirectional influences between frontal and occipitoparietal cortex for high arousing emotional relative to low arousing neutral pictures. Thus, both bottom-up and top-down accounts of the late latency response to emotion derived from psychological studies can be explained by a reciprocal codependency between activity in prefrontal and occipitoparietal cortex.

Neural dynamics of animacy processing in language comprehension: ERP evidence from the interpretation of classifier–noun combinations

An event-related potential experiment was conducted to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of animacy processing in the interpretation of classifier–noun combinations. Participants read sentences that had a non-canonical structure, object noun +subject noun+verb+numeral-classifier+adjective. The object noun and its classifier were either (a) congruent, (b) incongruent, but matching in animacy, or (c) incongruent, mismatching in animacy. An N400 effect was observed for both incongruent conditions, but not for additional mismatch in animacy. When only data from participants who accepted the non-canonical structure were analyzed, the animacy mismatch elicited a P600 but still no N400. These findings suggest that animacy information is not used immediately for semantic integration of nouns and their classifiers, but is used in a later analysis reflected by P600. Thus, the temporal neural dynamics of animacy processing in sentence comprehension may be modulated by the relevance of animacy to thematic interpretation.

Brain responses to case-marking violations in German preschool children

The processing of case-marking and argument structures was investigated in children at the age of 3 years, 4 years and 6 months, and 6 years. Two event-related potential (ERP) experiments were conducted in a case-marked language, i.e. German, comparing the processing of (a) double-nominative violations with subject-initial structures and (b) double-accusative violations with object-initial structures. It is known that for both violation types, adults display a biphasic N400/P600 ERP response, reflecting thematic-semantic, and syntactic processes. For double-nominative violations, 3-year-old children already show an adult-like processing pattern revealing their abilities to repair the tested structure. For double-accusative violations, ERP results indicate developmental processing differences with even 6-year-old children not showing an adult pattern. This suggests a late development of the complete function of the accusative case.

Manipulation of Orthogonal Neural Systems Together in Electrophysiological Recordings: The MONSTER Approach to Simultaneous Assessment of Multiple Neurocognitive Dimensions

Event-related potentials (ERPs) are a powerful tool in understanding and evaluating cognitive, affective, motor, and sensory processing in both healthy and pathological samples. A typical ERP recording session takes considerable time but is designed to isolate only 1-2 components. Although this is appropriate for most basic science purposes, it is an inefficient approach for measuring the broad set of neurocognitive functions that may be disrupted in a neurological or psychiatric disease. The present study provides a framework for more efficiently evaluating multiple neural processes in a single experimental paradigm through the manipulation of functionally orthogonal dimensions. We describe the general MONSTER (Manipulation of Orthogonal Neural Systems Together in Electrophysiological Recordings) approach and explain how it can be adapted to investigate a variety of neurocognitive domains, ERP components, and neural processes of interest. We also demonstrate how this approach can be used to assess group differences by providing data from an implementation of the MONSTER approach in younger (18-30 y of age) and older (65-85 y of age) adult samples. This specific implementation of the MONSTER framework assesses 4 separate neural processes in the visual domain: (1) early sensory processing, using the C1 wave; (2) shifts of covert attention, with the N2pc component; (3) categorization, with the P3 component; and (4) self-monitoring, with the error-related negativity. Although the MONSTER approach is primarily described in the context of ERP experiments, it could also be adapted easily for use with functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Electrophysiological evidence for use of the animacy hierarchy, but not thematic role assignment, during verb-argument processing

Animacy is known to play an important role in language processing and production, but debate remains as to how it exerts its effects: (1) through links to syntactic ordering, (2) through inherent differences between animate and inanimate entities in their salience/lexico-semantic accessibility, and (3) through links to specific thematic roles. We contrasted these three accounts in two event-related potential (ERP) experiments examining the processing of direct object arguments in simple English sentences. In Experiment 1, we found a larger N400 to animate than inanimate direct object arguments assigned the Patient role, ruling out the second account. In Experiment 2, we found no difference in the N400 evoked by animate direct object arguments assigned the Patient role (prototypically inanimate) and those assigned the Experiencer role (prototypically animate), ruling out the third account. We therefore suggest that animacy may impact processing through a direct link to syntactic linear ordering, at least on postverbal arguments in English. We also examined processing on direct object arguments that violated the animacy-based selection-restriction constraints of their preceding verbs. These violations evoked a robust P600, which was not modulated by thematic role assignment or reversibility, suggesting that the so-called semantic P600 is driven by overall propositional impossibility, rather than thematic role reanalysis.

Effect of intensity accents on the detection of interonset interval variations

Intensity effect on interonset interval (IOI) timing perception was investigated in an event-related potential experiment by manipulating the onset and intensity of one tone in an isochronous sequence. The results revealed that lengthened IOI elicited a larger P3 than the shortened or standard IOI, suggesting that more attention should be focused because of an additional stimulation of temporally driven expectancy induced by an onset delay. Furthermore, P3 latency for IOI occurred later when preceding softer tones than when preceding louder or standard tones, implicating that softer tone might introduce a disturbance and impede the entrainment of high-level processing in the temporal perception. Importantly, louder accents reduced the sensitivity of shortened and standard IOIs, supporting the prediction of compensation hypothesis.

If the real world were irrelevant, so to speak: The role of propositional truth-value in counterfactual sentence comprehension

Propositional truth-value can be a defining feature of a sentence’s relevance to the unfolding discourse, and establishing propositional truth-value in context can be key to successful interpretation. In the current study, we investigate its role in the comprehension of counterfactual conditionals, which describe imaginary consequences of hypothetical events, and are thought to require keeping in mind both what is true and what is false. Pre-stored real-world knowledge may therefore intrude upon and delay counterfactual comprehension, which is predicted by some accounts of discourse comprehension, and has been observed during online comprehension. The impact of propositional truth-value may thus be delayed in counterfactual conditionals, as also claimed for sentences containing other types of logical operators (e.g., negation, scalar quantifiers). In an event-related potential (ERP) experiment, we investigated the impact of propositional truth-value when described consequences are both true and predictable given the counterfactual premise. False words elicited larger N400 ERPs than true words, in negated counterfactual sentences (e.g., “If N.A.S.A. had not developed its Apollo Project, the first country to land on the moon would have been Russia/America”) and real-world sentences (e.g., “Because N.A.S.A. developed its Apollo Project, the first country to land on the moon was America/Russia”) alike. These indistinguishable N400 effects of propositional truth-value, elicited by opposite word pairs, argue against disruptions by real-world knowledge during counterfactual comprehension, and suggest that incoming words are mapped onto the counterfactual context without any delay. Thus, provided a sufficiently constraining context, propositional truth-value rapidly impacts ongoing semantic processing, be the proposition factual or counterfactual.

A Multi-Technique Source Localization Approach of “Tactile” Lasers in Peri-Personal Space

In an event-related potential (ERP) experiment, laser dots were either projected onto a table such that they appeared in a participant's peripheral field of view (FOV) or they were projected onto the participant's hands that were also placed within their peripheral FOV. An oddball paradigm was utilized where participants had to detect a laser deviant that appeared in a stream of standard laser stimuli. Participants were instructed to fixate on a central crosshair and to selectively attend to their left or right hand. In the hands-off condition, participants' ERPs waveform and topographical iso-potential map analyses revealed a typical contra-lateral primary visual activation. In the hands-on condition, the visual activation obtained in the hands-off condition shifted significantly toward anterior primary somatosensory areas. Localization techniques such as independent components analysis, dipole fitting, and sLORETA yielded results that were convincingly convergent with the ERP waveform and topographical map data. That is, visual laser stimuli appeared to possess tactile qualities when they were projected onto visible haptic regions of participant observers.

Event-Related Potential Study of Illusory Contour Perception in Schizophrenia

Schizophrenic patients and healthy controls participated in event-related potential experiments, in which illusory contour (IC) and control objects [no contour (NC), real contour (RC)] were passively presented. As a result, P100 latency for IC in schizophrenic patients was significantly prolonged (+10.6 ms) compared to those for RC. The present findings indicate that an abnormality of IC processing, including ‘bottom-up’ as well as ‘top-down’ processing, may reflect basal pathogenesis of various clinical representations of schizophrenia. However, the P100 latency difference between IC and RC was very small in the patient group. Rather, ‘cognitive’ in the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) model of Bell et al. significantly correlated with P100 latencies for NC. Such an association between PANSS and NC processing, where the shape must be inferred with increased attentional demands and ‘top-down’ processing, indicates that the abnormality of schizophrenic patients’ preattentive process might be a problem of ‘top-down’ processing rather than ‘bottom-up’ processing.

Social neuroscience: toward understanding the underpinnings of the social mind

The field of social cognitive neuroscience has captured the attention of many researchers during the past ten years. Much of the impetus for this new field came from the development of functional neuroimaging methods that made it possible to unobtrusively measure brain activation over time. Using these methods over the last 30 years has allowed psychologists to move from simple validation questions - would flashing stimuli activate the visual cortex - to those about the functional specialization of brain regions- are there regions in the inferior temporal cortex dedicated to face processing- to questions that, just a decade ago, would have been considered to be at such a level of analysis. These so-called intractable questions are the focus of the chapters in this book, which introduces social cognitive neuroscience research addressing questions of fundamental importance to social psychology: How do we understand and represent other people? How do we represent social groups? How do we regulate our emotions and socially undesirable responses? This book also presents innovative combinations of multiple methodologies, including behavioral experiments, computer modeling, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) experiments, Event-Related Potential (ERP) experiments, and brain lesion studies. It is divided into four sections. The first three sections present the latest research on, respectively, understanding and representing other people, representing social groups, and the interplay of cognition and emotion in social regulation. In the fourth section, contributors step back and consider a range of novel topics that have emerged in the context of social neuroscience research: understanding social exclusion as pain, deconstructing our moral intuitions, understanding cooperative exchanges with other agents, and the effect of aging on brain function and its implications for well-being. Taken together, these chapters provide a rich introduction to an exciting, rapidly developing and expanding field that promises a richer and deeper understanding of the social mind.

Identifying cognitive preferences for attractive female faces: An event-related potential experiment using a study-test paradigm

In this experiment, sensitivity to female facial attractiveness was examined by comparing event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to attractive and unattractive female faces within a study-test paradigm. Fourteen heterosexual participants (age range 18-24 years, mean age 21.67 years) were required to judge 84 attractive and 84 unattractive face images as either "attractive" or "unattractive." They were then asked whether they had previously viewed each face in a recognition task in which 50% of the images were novel. Analyses indicated that attractive faces elicited more enhanced ERP amplitudes than did unattractive faces in judgment (N300 and P350-550 msec) and recognition (P160 and N250-400 msec and P400-700 msec) tasks on anterior locations. Moreover, longer reaction times and higher accuracy rate were observed in identifying attractive faces than unattractive faces. In sum, this research identified neural and behavioral bases related to cognitive preferences for judging and recognizing attractive female faces. Explanations for the results are that attractive female faces arouse more intense positive emotions in participants than do unattractive faces, and they also represent reproductive fitness and mating value from the evolutionary perspective.

Understanding the Pathophysiology of Alzheimer's Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Mini Review on fMRI and ERP Studies

The prevalence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is predicted to increase rapidly in the coming decade, highlighting the importance of early detection and intervention in patients with AD and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Recently, remarkable advances have been made in the application of neuroimaging techniques in investigations of AD and MCI. Among the various neuroimaging techniques, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has many potential advantages, noninvasively detecting alterations in brain function that may be present very early in the course of AD and MCI. In this paper, we first review task-related and resting-state fMRI studies on AD and MCI. We then present our recent fMRI studies with additional event-related potential (ERP) experiments during a motion perception task in MCI. Our results indicate that fMRI, especially when combined with ERP recording, can be useful for detecting spatiotemporal functional changes in AD and MCI patients.

Gender differences in visual reflexive attention shifting: Evidence from an ERP study

Attention is considered a central component of cognitive functioning. While many studies have demonstrated that eye direction can trigger reflexive attention shifting, there have been few studies on gender differences in attention shifting. To explore this issue we present results from an event-related potential (ERP) experiment using the spatial cueing task, in which females show larger ERP component amplitude. We suggest this result may be because women have a larger cueing effect in the visual spatial attention task, which leads women to use more attention resources to complete the task. The result may also be because women mature earlier than men in the major brain areas for visual spatial attention, and therefore women have the more mature activation patterns with enhanced amplitude in these regions. Gender differences in visual attention shifting may moderate or contribute to gender differences in other cognitive activities, such as memory, thought, and speech. Future studies of cognitive ability and cognitive processes should pay more attention to the possible effects of gender.

Immediate integration of different types of prosodic information during on-line spoken language comprehension: An ERP study

An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate the role of prosodic prominence and prosodic boundary as well as their interaction in spoken discourse comprehension. Chinese question–answer dialogues were used as stimuli. The answer sentence is a syntactically ambiguous phrase, with a prosodic phrase boundary at the immediate left side of the critical word in the carrier sentence. Meanwhile, the critical word was accented. We manipulated the question context while keeping the speech signal of the answer sentence constant, which gives rise to congruent and in-congruent question–answer pairs with violations of prosodic prominence, prosodic boundary, or both. Results showed that prosodic prominence violation evoked a frontal–central negative effect (270–510 ms), while prosodic boundary violation elicited a broadly distributed negative effect (270–510 ms and 510–660 ms). The effect of combined prominence-boundary violation was similar to that of the single prosodic prominence violation. Furthermore, there was an interaction between the effect of prosodic prominence violation and the effect of prosodic boundary violation in the window latency of 270–510 ms, which suggests an immediate interaction between the semantic processing of prosodic prominence and the syntactic processing of prosodic boundary during spoken language comprehension. In addition, a detailed analysis of the obtained negativity effects showed that the size of the negative effect to the prosodic boundary violation was increased by an additional prosodic prominence violation, but the size of the negative effect to the prosodic prominence violation was not affected by an additional prosodic boundary violation, which suggests an asymmetry between the effects of prosodic prominence and prosodic boundary.

Testing an assumption of the E‐Z Reader model of eye‐movement control during reading: Using event‐related potentials to examine the familiarity check

According to the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control, the completion of an early stage of lexical processing, the familiarity check, causes the eyes to move forward during reading (Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher, & Rayner, 1998). Here, we report an event-related potential (ERP) experiment designed to examine the hypothesized familiarity check at the electrophysiological level. The results indicate ERP components modulated by word frequency at the time of the predicted familiarity check. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that an early stage of lexical processing is linked to the "decisions" about when to move the eyes during reading.

Detection of ERP components - comparison of basic methods and their modifications

Event Abstract Back to Event Detection of ERP components - comparison of basic methods and their modifications Tomas Rondik1* and Jindrich Ciniburk1 1 University of West Bohemia, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Czechia Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic Our research group in cooperation with other partner institutions (Czech Technical University in Prague, University Hospital in Pilsen, Škoda Auto Inc ...) specializes in the research of attention, especially attention of drivers and seriously injured people. With regard to our research we widely use the methods of electroencephalography (EEG) and event related potentials (ERP). Within our partner network we are responsible for technical and scientific issues, e.g. EEG/ERP laboratory operation, development of advanced software tools for EEG/ERP research, or analysis and proposal of signal processing methods. EEG and ERP experiments take usually long time and produce a lot of data. With the increasing number of experiments carried out in our laboratory we had to solve not only their long-term storage and management but also proposal and implementation of methods for their efficient analysis and processing. For example, it is a common task to look for a specific ERP component in the EEG signal to verify users’ reaction to a stimulus. It is a key aspect especially in brain-computer interface applications based on the ERP technique. We compared four methods and their modifications suitable for ERP detection - continuous wavelet transform (CWT), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), matching pursuit algorithm (MP) and Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT). The comparative criterion is their ability to detect whether an ERP component is / is not present in the EEG signal. There are many ways to implement a specific algorithm (or its modification), usually with the same aim – to make the algorithm faster. However, then aim of this comparison was to select a suitable method for ERP detection. The method will be used in our research and demo-applications in the future. Keywords: brain machine interface, Neuroimaging Conference: 4th INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics, Boston, United States, 4 Sep - 6 Sep, 2011. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Neuroimaging Citation: Rondik T and Ciniburk J (2011). Detection of ERP components - comparison of basic methods and their modifications. Front. Neuroinform. Conference Abstract: 4th INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics. doi: 10.3389/conf.fninf.2011.08.00022 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 17 Oct 2011; Published Online: 19 Oct 2011. * Correspondence: Dr. Tomas Rondik, University of West Bohemia, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Pilsen, Czechia, trondik@kiv.zcu.cz Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Tomas Rondik Jindrich Ciniburk Google Tomas Rondik Jindrich Ciniburk Google Scholar Tomas Rondik Jindrich Ciniburk PubMed Tomas Rondik Jindrich Ciniburk Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.