Event-related Potential Study Research Articles

Neural correlates of emotion-label vs. emotion-laden word processing in late bilinguals: evidence from an ERP study

ABSTRACT The brain processes underlying the distinction between emotion-label words (e.g. happy, sad) and emotion-laden words (e.g. successful, failed) remain inconclusive in bilingualism research. The present study aims to directly compare the processing of these two types of emotion words in both the first language (L1) and second language (L2) by recording event-related potentials (ERP) from late Chinese-English bilinguals during a lexical decision task. The results revealed that in the early word processing stages, the N170 emotion effect emerged only for L1 negative emotion-laden words and L2 negative emotion-label words. In addition, larger early posterior negativity (EPN) was elicited by emotion-laden words than emotion-label words in both L1 and L2. In the later processing stages, the N400 emotion effect was evident for L1 emotion words, excluding positive emotion-laden words, while it was absent in L2. Notably, L1 emotion words elicited enhanced N400 and attenuated late positive complex (LPC) compared to those in L2. Taken together, these findings confirmed the engagement of emotion, and highlighted the modulation of emotion word type and valence on word processing in both early and late processing stages. Different neural mechanisms between L1 and L2 in processing written emotion words were elucidated.

Attention modulates facial expression processing in subsyndromal depression: A behavioral and ERP study

Impaired facial expression perception is a core element in depression, but the underlying mechanism remains controversial. This event-related potential study investigated how attention modulates facial expression perception in depression using a nonclinical sample. A group of healthy controls (HC, N = 39) and a group of individuals with subsyndromal depression (SD, N = 39) categorized faces based on either facial expression (happy vs. sad) or gender (male vs. female). Behaviorally, the SD group was less sensitive to the emotional valence of facial expression than the HC group when their attention was directed to facial expression, as revealed by comparable subjective ratings and accuracy rates in response to facial expressions. When attention was directed towards facial gender, the SD group versus the HC group showed a negative bias, as revealed by a faster N170 for sad faces than happy faces. Together, our findings suggest that attention plays a role in understanding the relationship between depression and facial expression perception.

Aberrant effort-based reward dynamics in anhedonia.

Anhedonia is a transdiagnostic symptom and associated with a spectrum of reward deficits among which the motivational dysfunction is poorly understood. Previous studies have established the abnormal cost-benefit trade-off as a contributor to motivational deficits in anhedonia and its relevant psychiatric diseases. However, it remains elusive how the anhedonic neural dynamics underlying reward processing are modulated by effort expenditure. Using an effort-based monetary incentive delay task, the current event-related potential study examined the neural dynamics underlying the effort-reward interplay in anhedonia using a nonclinical sample who scored high or low on an anhedonia questionnaire. We found that effort prospectively decreased reward effect on the contingent variation negativity and the target-P3 but retrospectively enhanced outcome effect on the feedback-P3 following effort expenditure. Compared to the low-anhedonia group, the high-anhedonia group displayed a diminished effort effect on the target-P3 during effort expenditure and an increased effort-enhancement effect for neutral trials during the feedback-P3 period following effort expenditure. Our findings suggest that anhedonia is associated with an inefficient control and motivation allocation along the efforted-based reward dynamics from effort preparation to effort production.

Effect of emotional stimulus on response inhibition in people with mild cognitive impairment: an event-related potential study.

A few studies are emerging to explore the issue of how aging promotes emotional response inhibition. However, there is a lack of empirical study concerning the impact of pathological cognitive impairment on emotional response inhibition. The present study investigated the effect of emotion on response inhibition in people with mild cognitive impairment, the stage of cognitive impairment before dementia. We used two emotional stop-signal tasks to explore whether the dual competition framework considering limited cognitive resources could explain the relationship between emotion and response inhibition in mild cognitive impairment. The results showed that negative emotions prolonged N2 latency. The Go trial accuracy was reduced in the high-arousal negative conditions and the stop-signal reaction time was prolonged under high-arousal conditions. This study also verified impaired response inhibition in mild cognitive impairment and found that negative emotions prolonged P3 latency in mild cognitive impairment. Emotional information interferes with response inhibition in mild cognitive impairment populations, possibly because emotional information captures more attentional resources, thus interfering with response inhibition that relies on common-pool resources.

Changes in visually and auditory attended audiovisual speech processing in cochlear implant users: A longitudinal ERP study

Limited auditory input, whether caused by hearing loss or by electrical stimulation through a cochlear implant (CI), can be compensated by the remaining senses. Specifically for CI users, previous studies reported not only improved visual skills, but also altered cortical processing of unisensory visual and auditory stimuli. However, in multisensory scenarios, it is still unclear how auditory deprivation (before implantation) and electrical hearing experience (after implantation) affect cortical audiovisual speech processing.Here, we present a prospective longitudinal electroencephalography (EEG) study which systematically examined the deprivation- and CI-induced alterations of cortical processing of audiovisual words by comparing event-related potentials (ERPs) in postlingually deafened CI users before and after implantation (five weeks and six months of CI use). A group of matched normal-hearing (NH) listeners served as controls. The participants performed a word-identification task with congruent and incongruent audiovisual words, focusing their attention on either the visual (lip movement) or the auditory speech signal. This allowed us to study the (top-down) attention effect on the (bottom-up) sensory cortical processing of audiovisual speech.When compared to the NH listeners, the CI candidates (before implantation) and the CI users (after implantation) exhibited enhanced lipreading abilities and an altered cortical response at the N1 latency range (90–150 ms) that was characterized by a decreased theta oscillation power (4–8 Hz) and a smaller amplitude in the auditory cortex. After implantation, however, the auditory-cortex response gradually increased and developed a stronger intra-modal connectivity. Nevertheless, task efficiency and activation in the visual cortex was significantly modulated in both groups by focusing attention on the visual as compared to the auditory speech signal, with the NH listeners additionally showing an attention-dependent decrease in beta oscillation power (13–30 Hz).In sum, these results suggest remarkable deprivation effects on audiovisual speech processing in the auditory cortex, which partially reverse after implantation. Although even experienced CI users still show distinct audiovisual speech processing compared to NH listeners, pronounced effects of (top-down) direction of attention on (bottom-up) audiovisual processing can be observed in both groups. However, NH listeners but not CI users appear to show enhanced allocation of cognitive resources in visually as compared to auditory attended audiovisual speech conditions, which supports our behavioural observations of poorer lipreading abilities and reduced visual influence on audition in NH listeners as compared to CI users.

Facial expression recognition ability and its neuropsychological mechanisms in children with attention deficit and hyperactive disorder.

Attention deficit and hyperactive disorder (ADHD) is a chronic neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by inattention, hyperactivity-impulsivity, and working memory deficits. Social dysfunction is one of the major challenges faced by children with ADHD. It has been found that children with ADHD can't perform as well as typically developing children on facial expression recognition (FER) tasks. Generally, children with ADHD have some difficulties in FER, while some studies suggest that they have no significant differences in accuracy of specific emotion recognition compared with typically developing children. The neuropsychological mechanisms underlying these difficulties are as follows. First, neuroanatomically. Compared to typically developing children, children with ADHD show smaller gray matter volume and surface area in the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex regions, as well as reduced density and volume of axons/cells in certain frontal white matter fiber tracts. Second, neurophysiologically. Children with ADHD exhibit increased slow-wave activity in their electroencephalogram, and event-related potential studies reveal abnormalities in emotional regulation and responses to angry faces when facing facial stimuli. Third, psychologically. Psychosocial stressors may influence FER abilities in children with ADHD, and sleep deprivation in ADHD children may significantly increase their recognition threshold for negative expressions such as sadness and anger. This article reviews research progress over the past three years on FER abilities of children with ADHD, analyzing the FER deficit in children with ADHD from three dimensions: neuroanatomy, neurophysiology and psychology, aiming to provide new perspectives for further research and clinical treatment of ADHD.

A longitudinal event-related potentials study of idiom processing in healthy elderly adults

A longitudinal event-related potentials study of idiom processing in healthy elderly adults

The time course of feature-selective attention inside and outside the focus of spatial attention

Research on attentional selection of stimulus features has yielded seemingly contradictory results. On the one hand, many experiments in humans and animals have observed a "global" facilitation of attended features across the entire visual field, even when spatial attention is focused on a single location. On the other hand, several event-related potential studies in humans reported that attended features are enhanced at the attended location only. The present experiment demonstrates that these conflicting results can be explained by differences in the timing of attentional allocation inside and outside the spatial focus of attention. Participants attended to fields of either red or blue randomly moving dots on either the left or right side of fixation with the task of detecting brief coherent motion targets. Recordings of steady-state visual evoked potentials elicited by the flickering stimuli allowed concurrent measurement of the time course of feature-selective attention in visual cortex on both the attended and the unattended sides. The onset of feature-selective attentional modulation on the attended side occurred around 150 ms earlier than on the unattended side. This finding that feature-selective attention is not spatially global from the outset but extends to unattended locations after a temporal delay resolves previous contradictions between studies finding global versus hierarchical selection of features and provides insight into the fundamental relationship between feature-based and location-based (spatial) attention mechanisms.

Naturalistic use of psychedelics does not modulate processing of self-related stimuli (but it might modulate attentional mechanisms): An event-related potentials study.

Classic psychedelics are able to profoundly alter the state of consciousness and lead to acute experiences of ego dissolution - the blurring of the distinction between representations of self and the external world. However, whether repeated use of psychedelics is associated with more prolonged and permanent modifications to the concept of self remains to be investigated. Therefore, we conducted a preregistered, cross-sectional study in which experienced psychedelics users (15 or more lifetime experiences with psychedelics; N = 56) were compared to nonusers (N = 57) in terms of neural reactivity to a Self-name (i.e., each participant's own name) stimulus, which is known to robustly activate a representation of self. Two control stimuli were additionally used: an Other-name stimulus, as a passive control condition in which no reaction was required, and a Target-name stimulus, to which participants provided a manual response and which thus constituted an active control condition. Analysis of the amplitude of the P300 ERP component evoked by the Self- or Target-names revealed no difference between the psychedelics users and nonusers. However, psychedelic users exhibited increased P300 amplitude during perception of Other-names. In addition, in comparison to nonusers, psychedelics users exhibited a smaller increase in P300 amplitude when processing the task-relevant Target-names (in relation to both Self- and Other-names). Therefore, our data suggests that regular naturalistic use of psychedelics may not be related to long-term changes in the representation of self, but it might potentially affect the allocation of attentional resources to task-relevant stimuli.

The concrete processing of Chinese action metaphors: an ERP study.

The present research adopts ERP (Event-Related Potentials) technology to investigate whether there exists a concreteness effect in the processing of Chinese action verbs within metaphorical context. The mean amplitudes of N400 activated by action metaphors were compared with those activated by literal verbs and abstract verbs. The findings indicated that the Met verbs evoked a significantly larger N400 response at frontal brain region compared to the Abs verbs at a time window 200-500 ms, while the Met verbs elicited a notably greater N400 amplitude specifically at the posterior brain region in comparison to the Lit verbs at 300-500 ms time window. These results may be interpreted as indicating that the comprehension of the Met verbs is based on the concrete action semantics.

Individual differences in auditory perception predict learning of non-adjacent tone sequences in 3-year-olds.

Auditory processing of speech and non-speech stimuli oftentimes involves the analysis and acquisition of non-adjacent sound patterns. Previous studies using speech material have demonstrated (i) children's early emerging ability to extract non-adjacent dependencies (NADs) and (ii) a relation between basic auditory perception and this ability. Yet, it is currently unclear whether children show similar sensitivities and similar perceptual influences for NADs in the non-linguistic domain. We conducted an event-related potential study with 3-year-old children using a sine-tone-based oddball task, which simultaneously tested for NAD learning and auditory perception by means of varying sound intensity. Standard stimuli were A × B sine-tone sequences, in which specific A elements predicted specific B elements after variable × elements. NAD deviants violated the dependency between A and B and intensity deviants were reduced in amplitude. Both elicited similar frontally distributed positivities, suggesting successful deviant detection. Crucially, there was a predictive relationship between the amplitude of the sound intensity discrimination effect and the amplitude of the NAD learning effect. These results are taken as evidence that NAD learning in the non-linguistic domain is functional in 3-year-olds and that basic auditory processes are related to the learning of higher-order auditory regularities also outside the linguistic domain.

A study of ERPs acquired during handwritten and printed Chinese character processing in a lexical decision task

The aim of this study was to investigate the time course differences in brain processing between handwritten and printed Chinese characters. Behavioural and event-related potential (ERP) data were collected from twenty participants as they performed a lexical decision task in which Chinese handwritten and printed characters served as stimuli. The findings indicated that N1 reflects orthographic regularity during the early processing stage; N400 and the late positive component (LPC) data revealed that reading handwritten words evoke greater ERP amplitudes during the late processing stage. Although handwritten characters evoke greater ERP amplitudes, this did not result in more efficient behavioural outcomes. Therefore, it appears that the greater ERP amplitudes observed in the handwriting task corresponded to deeper meaning comprehension, which is also more challenging for semantic integration.

Relative saliency affects attentional capture and suppression of color and face singleton distractors: evidence from event-related potential studies.

Prior research has yet to fully elucidate the impact of varying relative saliency between target and distractor on attentional capture and suppression, along with their underlying neural mechanisms, especially when social (e.g. face) and perceptual (e.g. color) information interchangeably serve as singleton targets or distractors, competing for attention in a search array. Here, we employed an additional singleton paradigm to investigate the effects of relative saliency on attentional capture (as assessed by N2pc) and suppression (as assessed by PD) of color or face singleton distractors in a visual search task by recording event-related potentials. We found that face singleton distractors with higher relative saliency induced stronger attentional processing. Furthermore, enhancing the physical salience of colors using a bold color ring could enhance attentional processing toward color singleton distractors. Reducing the physical salience of facial stimuli by blurring weakened attentional processing toward face singleton distractors; however, blurring enhanced attentional processing toward color singleton distractors because of the change in relative saliency. In conclusion, the attentional processes of singleton distractors are affected by their relative saliency to singleton targets, with higher relative saliency of singleton distractors resulting in stronger attentional capture and suppression; faces, however, exhibit some specificity in attentional capture and suppression due to high social saliency.

Video game addiction is associated with early stage of inhibitory control problems: An event-related potential study using cued Go/NoGo task.

Video game addiction (VGA) is associated with cognitive problems, particularly deficits in inhibitory control. The present study aimed to investigate behavioural responses and event-related potential associated with specific response inhibition using the cued Go/NoGo task to examine the effects of VGA on brain activity related to response inhibition. Twenty-five individuals addicted to video games (action video games) and 25 matched healthy controls participated in the study. The results showed that the VGA group had significantly more commission error in the NoGo trials and faster reaction time in the Go trials compared with the control group. The event-related potential analyses revealed significant reductions in amplitudes of N2 cue and N2 NoGo in the VGA group. While there was no significant difference between the N2 amplitudes of the Go and NoGo trials in the VGA group, the control group had a larger N2 amplitude in the NoGo trials. These results indicate that VGA subjects have difficulties in the early stages of response inhibition, as well as some level of impairment in proactive cognitive control.

Distinct neural dynamics of the observed ostracism effect in decision-making under risk and ambiguity.

Observational ostracism, as a form of social exclusion, can significantly affect human behavior. However, the effects of observed ostracism on risky and ambiguous decision-making and the underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. This event-related potential study investigated these issues by involving participants in a wheel-of- fortune task, considering observed ostracism and inclusion contexts. The results showed that the cue-P3 component was more enhanced during the choice phase for risky decisions than for ambiguous decisions in the observed inclusion contexts but not in the observed ostracism contexts. During the outcome evaluation phase, feedback-related negativity amplitudes following both risky and ambiguous decisions were higher in the no-gain condition than in the gain condition in the observed inclusion context. In contrast, this effect was only observed following risky decisions in the observed ostracism context. The feedback-P3 component did not exhibit an observed ostracism effect in risky and ambiguous decision-making tasks. Risk levels further modulated the cue-P3 and feedback-related negativity components, while ambiguity levels further modulated the feedback-P3 components. These findings demonstrate a neural dissociation between risk and ambiguity decision-making during observed ostracism that unfolds from the choice phase to the outcome evaluation phase.

Two-Hour Nicotine Withdrawal Improves Inhibitory Control Dysfunction in Male Smokers: Evidence from a Smoking-Cued Go/No-Go Task ERP Study.

Nicotine withdrawal is a multifaceted physiological and psychological process that can induce a spectrum of mood disturbances. Gaining a more nuanced understanding of how pure nicotine withdrawal influences cognitive control functions may provide valuable insights for the enhancement of smoking cessation programs. This study investigated changes in inhibitory control function in smokers after 2-hour nicotine withdrawal using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. 28 nicotine dependence (ND) patients and 28 health controls (HCs) completed a smoking-cued Go/No-go task containing two different types of picture stimuli, smoking-cued and neutral picture stimuli. We analyzed the behavioral and ERP data using a mixed model Repeated Measure Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). No-go trials accuracy rate (ACC) at baseline (time 1) was lower in the ND group compared to HCs with smoking-cued stimuli, and No-go trials ACC after 2-hour nicotine withdrawal (time 2) was not lower in the ND group compared to HCs. When confronted with smoking-cued stimuli, the No-go trials ACC was higher in time 2 than in time 1 in the ND group. For the ERP component, the No-go N2 amplitudes in the ND group with smoking-cued stimuli were lower than that of HCs, whereas after 2-hour nicotine withdrawal, the ND group's No-go N2 amplitudes higher than that at time 1, and did not differ from that of HCs. No-go P3 amplitudes were not significantly different between the two groups. Evidenced from ERP data, ND patients have an inhibitory control dysfunction in the face of smoking cues, which is mainly manifested in the early stage of response inhibition rather than in the late stage. Two-hour nicotine withdrawal improves inhibitory control dysfunction in ND patients. The No-go N2 component is an important and sensitive neuroelectrophysiological indicator of inhibitory control function in ND patients.

Educational influence on women’s colour perception: C1 eventrelated component analysis

Objective This study aimed to investigate colour perception in women from different educational groups using an event-related potential (ERP) analysis to examine the influence of education on colour processing among women.
 Materials and methods Twenty-four age-matched women, from high-, medium-, and low-education groups (n = 8 in each group), were recruited in this study. 128-ERP net was used for the ERP study. All women presented their like or dislike for a particular colour by pressing button ‘1’ or ‘2’, respectively. Nine electrodes were chosen to analyse the amplitudes and latencies of the C1 ERP component.
 Results and Discussion We found no significant differences in the amplitudes and latencies of the C1 ERP component between groups. A smaller amplitude of the C1 component indicated good perceptual learning, and no significant change indicated spatial or featurebased neutral stimuli. In this study, no significant change in the C1 amplitude was found, and we inferred that education did not influence colour processing, as colour was possibly a featurebased neutral stimulus for women. Conclusion: Education did not influence colour perception in women.
 Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol. 23 No. 02 April’24 Page : 471-475

Relationship Between the Parietal Cortex and Task Switching: Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Combined with an Event-related Potential Study

Task switching refers to a set of cognitive processes involved in shifting attention from one task to another. In recent years, researchers have applied transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to investigate the causal relationship between the parietal cortex and task switching. However, results from available studies are highly inconsistent. This may be due to the unclear understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Therefore, the current study utilized event-related potential (ERP) analysis to investigate the modulatory effects of tDCS on task-switching processes. Twenty-four subjects were recruited to perform both predictable and unpredictable parity/magnitude tasks under anodal (RA) and sham conditions. The results showed no significant changes in behavioral performance. However, marked tDCS-induced ERP changes were observed. Specifically, for the predictable task switching, compared with the sham condition, the target-N2 component occurred significantly earlier for switch trials than repeat trials under the RA condition in males, while no difference was found in females. For unpredictable task switching, under the sham condition, the P2 peak was significantly larger for switch trials compared with repeat trials, whereas this difference was not observed under the RA condition. These results indicated the causal relationship between the right parietal cortex and exogenous adjustment processes involved in task switching. Moreover, anodal tDCS over the right parietal cortex may lead to the manifestation of gender differences.

Visual modulation of auditory evoked potentials in the cat

Visual modulation of the auditory system is not only a neural substrate for multisensory processing, but also serves as a backup input underlying cross-modal plasticity in deaf individuals. Event-related potential (ERP) studies in humans have provided evidence of a multiple-stage audiovisual interactions, ranging from tens to hundreds of milliseconds after the presentation of stimuli. However, it is still unknown if the temporal course of visual modulation in the auditory ERPs can be characterized in animal models. EEG signals were recorded in sedated cats from subdermal needle electrodes. The auditory stimuli (clicks) and visual stimuli (flashes) were timed by two independent Poison processes and were presented either simultaneously or alone. The visual-only ERPs were subtracted from audiovisual ERPs before being compared to the auditory-only ERPs. N1 amplitude showed a trend of transiting from suppression-to-facilitation with a disruption at ~ 100-ms flash-to-click delay. We concluded that visual modulation as a function of SOA with extended range is more complex than previously characterized with short SOAs and its periodic pattern can be interpreted with “phase resetting” hypothesis.

Using multivariate pattern analysis to increase effect sizes for event-related potential analyses.

Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) approaches can be applied to the topographic distribution of event-related potential (ERP) signals to "decode" subtly different stimulus classes, such as different faces or different orientations. These approaches are extremely sensitive, and it seems possible that they could also be used to increase effect sizes and statistical power in traditional paradigms that ask whether an ERP component differs in amplitude across conditions. To assess this possibility, we leveraged the open-source ERP CORE data set and compared the effect sizes resulting from conventional univariate analyses of mean amplitude with two MVPA approaches (support vector machine decoding and the cross-validated Mahalanobis distance, both of which are easy to compute using open-source software). We assessed these approaches across seven widely studied ERP components (N170, N400, N2pc, P3b, lateral readiness potential, error related negativity, and mismatch negativity). Across all components, we found that multivariate approaches yielded effect sizes that were as large or larger than the effect sizes produced by univariate approaches. These results indicate that researchers could obtain larger effect sizes, and therefore greater statistical power, by using multivariate analysis of topographic voltage patterns instead of traditional univariate analyses in many ERP studies.