Positive Event-related Potentials Research Articles

Electrical brain activations in preadolescents during a probabilistic reward-learning task reflect cognitive processes and behavioral strategy.

Both adults and children learn through feedback which environmental events and choices are associated with higher probability of reward, an ability thought to be supported by the development of fronto-striatal reward circuits. Recent developmental studies have applied computational models of reward learning to investigate such learning in children. However, tasks and measures effective for assaying the cascade of reward-learning neural processes in children have been limited. Using a child-version of a probabilistic reward-learning task while recording event-related-potential (ERP) measures of electrical brain activity, this study examined key processes of reward learning in preadolescents (8-12 years old; n=30), namely: (1) reward-feedback sensitivity, as measured by the early-latency, reward-related, frontal ERP positivity, (2) rapid attentional shifting of processing toward favored visual stimuli, as measured by the N2pc component, and (3) longer-latency attention-related responses to reward feedback as a function of behavioral strategies (i.e., Win-Stay-Lose-Shift), as measured by the central-parietal P300. Consistent with our prior work in adults, the behavioral findings indicate preadolescents can learn stimulus-reward outcome associations, but at varying levels of performance. Neurally, poor preadolescent learners (those with slower learning rates) showed greater reward-related positivity amplitudes relative to good learners, suggesting greater reward-feedback sensitivity. We also found attention shifting towards to-be-chosen stimuli, as evidenced by the N2pc, but not to more highly rewarded stimuli as we have observed in adults. Lastly, we found the behavioral learning strategy (i.e., Win-Stay-Lose-Shift) reflected by the feedback-elicited parietal P300. These findings provide novel insights into the key neural processes underlying reinforcement learning in preadolescents.

Losses disguised as wins evoke the reward positivity event-related potential in a simulated machine gambling task.

Electronic gambling machines include a suite of design characteristics that may contribute to gambling-related harms and require more careful attention of regulators and policymakers. One strategy that has contributed to these concerns is the presentation of "losses disguised as wins" (LDWs), a type of salient losing outcome in which a gambling payout is less than the amount wagered (i.e., a net loss), but is nonetheless accompanied by the celebratory audio-visual stimuli that typically accompany a genuine win. These events could thereby be mistaken for gains, or otherwise act as a reward signal, reinforcing persistent gambling, despite being a loss. This study aimed to determine whether LDWs evoke a reward positivity component in a task modeled on slot machine gambling. A prominent account of the reward positivity event-related potential suggests that it is evoked during the positive appraisal of task-related feedback, relative to neutral or negative events, or that it is evoked by neural systems that implement the computation of a positive reward prediction error. We recruited 32 individuals from university recruitment pools and asked them to engage in a simple gambling task designed to mimic key features of a slot machine design. The reward positivity was identified using temporospatial principal components analysis. Results indicated a more positive reward positivity following LDWs relative to clear losses, consistent with the theory that LDWs contribute to positive reinforcement of continued gambling, despite being net losses.

Dyadic cooperation with human and artificial agents: Event-related potentials trace dynamic role taking during an interactive game.

Humans are highly co-operative and thus cognitively, affectively, and motivationally tuned to pursue shared goals. Yet, cooperative tasks typically require people to constantly take and switch individual roles. Task relevance is dictated by these roles and thereby dynamically changing. Here, we designed a dyadic game to test whether the family of P3 components can trace this dynamic allocation of task relevance. We demonstrate that late positive event-related potential (ERP) modulations not only reflect predictable asymmetries between receiving and sending information but also differentiate whether the receiver's role is related to correct decision making or action monitoring. Furthermore, similar results were observed when playing the game with a computer, suggesting that experimental games may motivate humans to similarly cooperate with an artificial agent. Overall, late positive ERP waves provide a real-time measure of how role taking dynamically shapes the meaning and relevance of stimuli within collaborative contexts. Our results, therefore, shed light on how the processes of mutual coordination unfold during dyadic cooperation.

Reward association impairs recognition of incidentally encoded negative information: Electrophysiological evidence

Previous studies investigating the effect of reward on emotional episodic memory have produced inconsistent results. In this study, through two experiments using event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated the effect of reward association on the encoding and retrieval of incidentally encoded emotional information, and examined whether this effect changes over time. Participants in the two experiments were asked to discriminate the emotional valence of color images under reward or no-reward condition and incidentally encode them. Immediate (in Experiment 1) or 24-hour delayed (in Experiment 2) recognition after encoding was tested. In Experiments 1 and 2, reward (relative to no-reward) significantly improved the recognition of positive and neutral items, but significantly reduced the recognition of negative items. During encoding, the significant ERP reward effects (significantly more positive ERP amplitude for rewarded items than for non-rewarded ones) for positive and neutral images were widely distributed from 200 to 1500 ms after image onset, while those for negative stimuli occurred mainly from 200 to 500 ms. During retrieval, the significant ERP reward effects for positive and neutral items occurred in the two experiments, but the reversed ERP reward effects for negative items were found only in Experiment 1. The results of the present study suggest that reward association affects the encoding and retrieval of emotional images by enhancing memory processing efficiency of positive and neutral items, while impairing recognition of negative items, thus yielding a robust and sustained modulation over frontal/frontocentral or centroparietal/parietal areas where mechanisms of reward and emotion processing operate in conjunction.

Information-Theoretic Approaches in EEG Correlates of Auditory Perceptual Awareness under Informational Masking.

In informational masking paradigms, the successful segregation between the target and masker creates auditory perceptual awareness. The dynamics of the build-up of auditory perception is based on a set of interactions between bottom-up and top-down processes that generate neuronal modifications within the brain network activity. These neural changes are studied here using event-related potentials (ERPs), entropy, and integrated information, leading to several measures applied to electroencephalogram signals. The main findings show that the auditory perceptual awareness stimulated functional activation in the fronto-temporo-parietal brain network through (i) negative temporal and positive centro-parietal ERP components; (ii) an enhanced processing of multi-information in the temporal cortex; and (iii) an increase in informational content in the fronto-central cortex. These different results provide information-based experimental evidence about the functional activation of the fronto-temporo-parietal brain network during auditory perceptual awareness.

Beyond the N400: Confirmed and Disconfirmed Lexical Predictions in Aging

One of the basic tenets of predictive theories of language processing is that of misprediction cost. Post-N400 positive event-related potential (ERP) components are suitable for studying misprediction cost, but are not adequately described, especially in older adults, who show attenuated N400 ERP effects. We report a secondary analysis of a previously collected EEG data set. Using a picture–word matching paradigm, in which the target word could sometimes be predicted by context and sometimes not, the relationship between aging and late ERP effects was examined. Positivity effects for prediction violations were larger and more extended in older compared with younger adults, independent of context. Younger adults showed frontal negativity effects, indicating frame-shifting processes. Our data suggest that aging does not entail specific declines in prediction. Rather, they indicate that older adults may experience more processing difficulties than younger adults when their expectations are disconfirmed and that multiple mechanisms may be employed during language processing.

Understanding the Effects of Constraint and Predictability in ERP.

Intuitively, strongly constraining contexts should lead to stronger probabilistic representations of sentences in memory. Encountering unexpected words could therefore be expected to trigger costlier shifts in these representations than expected words. However, psycholinguistic measures commonly used to study probabilistic processing, such as the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, are sensitive to word predictability but not to contextual constraint. Some research suggests that constraint-related processing cost may be measurable via an ERP positivity following the N400, known as the anterior post-N400 positivity (PNP). The PNP is argued to reflect update of a sentence representation and to be distinct from the posterior P600, which reflects conflict detection and reanalysis. However, constraint-related PNP findings are inconsistent. We sought to conceptually replicate Federmeier et al. (2007) and Kuperberg et al. (2020), who observed that the PNP, but not the N400 or the P600, was affected by constraint at unexpected but plausible words. Using a pre-registered design and statistical approach maximising power, we demonstrated a dissociated effect of predictability and constraint: strong evidence for predictability but not constraint in the N400 window, and strong evidence for constraint but not predictability in the later window. However, the constraint effect was consistent with a P600 and not a PNP, suggesting increased conflict between a strong representation and unexpected input rather than greater update of the representation. We conclude that either a simple strong/weak constraint design is not always sufficient to elicit the PNP, or that previous PNP constraint findings could be an artifact of smaller sample size.

Effects of cognitive reappraisal on directed forgetting of negative emotional memory: an ERP study.

This study aimed to adopt the item-method directed forgetting (DF) paradigm to explore the effects of cognitive reappraisal on intentional forgetting of negative emotional pictures. Behavioral results showed that the recognition of to-be-forgotten but remembered (TBF-r) was significantly greater than that of to-be-remembered and remembered (TBR-r) in the recognition test, which was the opposite result to the DF effect. Event-related potential (ERP) results showed that in the 450-660ms (ms) of cue presentation, the F-cue of the cognitive reappraisal condition (imagining the upcoming pictures to be "fake or performed by actors" to avoid or reduce the intensity of negative emotions caused by the pictures) elicited more positive late positive potential (LPP) than passive viewing (participants watched freely and paid attention to the characters, scenes, and other details in the picture). This indicated that cognitive reappraisal required stronger inhibition than passive viewing for the to-be- forgotten (TBF) items. In the test phase, both the TBR-r and TBF-r items in the cognitive reappraisal condition evoked more positive ERP than correctly rejected (CR) unseen items in the study phase, which induced the frontal old/new effect (P200, 160-240ms). In addition, this study also found that the LPP amplitudes of 450-660ms in the frontal area induced by F-cues in cognitive reappraisal were significantly negatively correlated with the LPP amplitudes of 300-3500ms induced by cognitive reappraisal instructions, and positive waves in the frontal area were significantly positively correlated with the TBF-r behavioral results. However, these results were not observed in the passive viewing group. The above results show that cognitive reappraisal enhances the retrieval ability for TBR and TBF items, and TBF-r is associated with cognitive reappraisal in the study phase and inhibitory control of F-cues.

Increased Pre-Boundary Lengthening Does Not Enhance Implicit Intonational Phrase Perception in European Portuguese: An EEG Study.

Prosodic phrasing is the segmentation of utterances into prosodic words, phonological phrases (smaller units) and intonational phrases (larger units) based on acoustic cues-pauses, pitch changes and pre-boundary lengthening. The perception of prosodic boundaries is characterized by a positive event-related potential (ERP) component, temporally aligned with phrase boundaries-the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). The role of pre-boundary lengthening in boundary perception is still a matter of debate: while studies on phonological phrase boundaries indicate that all three cues contribute equally, approaches to intonational phrase boundaries highlight the pause as the most powerful cue. Moreover, all studies used explicit boundary recognition tasks, and it is unknown how pre-boundary lengthening works in implicit prosodic processing tasks, characteristic of real-life contexts. In this study, we examined the effects of pre-boundary lengthening (original, short, and long) on the EEG responses to intonational phrase boundaries (CPS effect) in European Portuguese, using an implicit task. Both original and short versions showed equivalent CPS effects, while the long set did not elicit the effect. This suggests that pre-boundary lengthening does not contribute to improved perception of boundaries in intonational phrases (longer units), possibly due to memory and attention-related constraints.

The Neural Mechanisms of the Effect of Spontaneous Insight on Re-Solution: An ERP Study

The insight memory advantage refers to the situation in which memory performance could be improved by solving a problem with an Aha experience. In re-solution tests and recognition tests, studies demonstrate an insight memory advantage by spontaneous insight or induced insight. For the re-solution test, the neural mechanisms of the effect of induced insight were studied by the fMRI technique. However, the neural mechanisms of the effect of insight on re-solution in the temporal dimension were not known. The neural mechanisms of the effect of spontaneous insight on re-solution were not known. In the present study, we use the compound remote-associated (CRA) task to reveal the neural mechanisms of the effect of spontaneous insight on re-solution by the event-related potentials (ERPs) technique. The 25 participants were asked to solve a series of Chinese verbal CRA tasks and then perform a re-solution test 1 day later. Our results indicated that the solution with the Aha experience evoked a larger N400 in the early solution phase and a more negative wave in the late solution phase than the solution with no Aha experience. In the re-solution phase, items with an Aha during the solution phase were re-solved better with higher Aha rates than items with no Aha. In the re-solution phase, compared with items with no Aha, items with an Aha during the solution phase evoked a larger positive ERP in the 250 to 350 ms time window in the early phase, and a more negative deflection before the response (-900 to -800 ms) in the later phase. In one word, spontaneous insight during the solution phase could promote re-solution and elicit ERP deflection in the re-solution phase.

The consistency of self-reference and mother reference in social evaluation

In social interactions an individual's perception of others' facial expressions is usually influenced by the evaluation of personality traits, especially negative evaluations. We integrated social-appraisal contexts with self- and motherreferential processing in a Chinese cultural context to examine the effect of context, including different potencies and reference types, on the individual's emotional perceptual processes of others' facial expressions. We found that neutral faces presented in positive/negative self-referential and motherreferential contexts were perceived as more positive/more negative than were neutral faces presented in other-referential contexts. Event-related potential (ERP) data showed that self-referential and mother-referential negative contexts induced more pronounced early posterior negativity and late positive potential components than did other-referential contexts. However, these same contexts did not significantly affect the results of the positive ERP component that occurs approximately 100 ms after stimulus presentation (P1) and the negative deflection in wave amplitude that occurs around 170 ms after the presentation of a face (N170). These results suggest that social-behavioral appraisals related to self and mother can influence the individual's perception of an appraiser's facial emotions even when there is no personality trait appraisal.

Electrocortical measures of win and loss processing are associated with mesocorticolimbic functional connectivity: A combined ERP and rs-fMRI study.

The reward positivity (RewP) event-related potential is a well-validated measure of reward processing implicated in internalizing psychopathologies. The RewP is thought to reflect reward reactivity in the mesocorticolimbic system; however, it is not clear how the RewP is related to the functional connectivity of reward-related brain regions. The current study examined associations between the RewP (Win and Loss residuals) and resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI), among adults with internalizing psychopathology (IP) and healthy controls (HC). All participants (N=102) completed a validated monetary reward task during electroencephalogram and rs-fMRI. Regression analyses were conducted with (1) RewP-Win residual amplitude and striatal seeds (caudate, putamen, nucleus accumbens) and (2) RewP-Loss residual amplitude and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) seeds. Overall, individuals with greater RewP-Win residual amplitude demonstrated increased rs-fMRI connectivity between striatal regions and the medial prefrontal cortex, as well as the parahippocampal gyrus, but decreased connectivity between striatal regions and regions involved in cognitive control and sensorimotor processing. Greater RewP-Loss residual was related to greater connectivity between the ACC and regions involved in reward/loss processing and motor control, but decreased connectivity between the ACC and regions involved in cognitive control. Relationships between the RewP and rs-fMRI were generally consistent across IP and HC. However, a few patterns were unique to IP. Results indicate the RewP is associated with resting-state functional connectivity of reward- and loss-related brain regions, suggesting connectivity of the mesocorticolimbic system may be an important individual difference factor in dimensions of attainment of reward and loss.

How do medical students understand disease behaviors? Evidence from event-related potentials

To investigate how medical students process Western medicine (WM) terms vs . traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) terms and how this is impacted by analogical priming from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience. The experiments were designed as a 2 (TCM terms vs . WM terms) × 2 (correct terms vs . incorrect terms) × 2 (analogical priming task vs . non-priming task) scheme. A total of 26 medical students completed a non-priming judgment task and an analogical priming judgment task on medical terms. During the tasks, the participants were asked to make correct/incorrect judgments on WM terms and TCM terms, and their behavioral data and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Behaviorally, the response speed and accuracy of WM terms were higher than those of TCM terms (both P < .001), indicating a prominent concreteness effect. Analogical priming shortened the response time to medical terms ( P < .001), and the response time to TCM terms was shortened more significantly ( P = .001). For ERPs, WM terms induced a larger P200 (an early positive ERP component), a smaller N400 (a negative ERP component), and a higher late positive ERP component, indicating superiority of attention adjustment, smaller-scale semantic activation, and a higher cost of late semantic analysis and integration. However, the analogical priming eliminated the difference between WM and TCM terms in P200 and N400 while maintaining it in the LPC. This suggests that WM terms are sensitive to analogical attention adjustment, and TCM terms are susceptible to analogical semantic integration. Our findings suggest that WM and TCM disease behavior terms may initially differ in concreteness or the use of a verbal-linguistic system. Analogy is more conducive to understanding TCM terms. This research provides important neuroscientific evidence of the difference in thinking between TCM and WM.

Differences in dogs' event-related potentials in response to human and dog vocal stimuli; a non-invasive study.

Recent advances in the field of canine neuro-cognition allow for the non-invasive research of brain mechanisms in family dogs. Considering the striking similarities between dog's and human (infant)'s socio-cognition at the behavioural level, both similarities and differences in neural background can be of particular relevance. The current study investigates brain responses of n = 17 family dogs to human and conspecific emotional vocalizations using a fully non-invasive event-related potential (ERP) paradigm. We found that similarly to humans, dogs show a differential ERP response depending on the species of the caller, demonstrated by a more positive ERP response to human vocalizations compared to dog vocalizations in a time window between 250 and 650 ms after stimulus onset. A later time window between 800 and 900 ms also revealed a valence-sensitive ERP response in interaction with the species of the caller. Our results are, to our knowledge, the first ERP evidence to show the species sensitivity of vocal neural processing in dogs along with indications of valence sensitive processes in later post-stimulus time periods.

Attribution of intentions in autism spectrum disorder: A study of event-related potentials.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by social cognition deficits, including difficulties inferring the intentions of others. Although deficits in attribution of intentions (AI) have been consistently replicated in ASD, their exact nature remains unexplored. Here we registered the electrophysiological correlates of a nonverbal social cognition task to investigate AI in autistic adults. Twenty-one male autistic adults and 30 male neurotypical volunteers performed a comic strips task depicting either intentional action (AI) or physical causality with or without human characters, while their electroencephalographic signal was recorded. Compared to neurotypical volunteers, autistic participants were significantly less accurate in correctly identifying congruence in the AI condition, but not in the physical causality conditions. In the AI condition a bilateral posterior positive event-related potential (ERP) occurred 200-400 ms post-stimulus (the ERP intention effect) in both groups. This waveform comprised a P200 and a P300 component, with the P200 component being larger for the AI condition in neurotypical volunteers but not in autistic individuals, who also showed a longer latency for this waveform. Group differences in amplitude of the ERP intention effect only became evident when we compared autistic participants to a subgroup of similarly performing neurotypical participants, suggesting that the atypical ERP waveform in ASD is an effect of group, rather than a marker of low-task performance. Together, these results suggest that the lower accuracy of the ASD group in the AI task may result from impaired early attentional processing and contextual integration of socially relevant cues. LAY SUMMARY: To understand why autistic people have difficulties in inferring others' intentions, we asked participants to judge the congruence of the endings of comic strips depicting either intentional actions (e.g., fetching a chair to reach for something) or situations solely following physical rules (e.g., an apple falling on someone's head), while their electrical brain activity was recorded. Autistic individuals had more difficulties in inferring intentions than neurotypical controls, which may reflect impaired attention and contextual integration of social cues.

Exploring New Insights Into Explicit and Implicit Second Language Processing: Event‐Related Potentials Analyzed by Source Attribution

AbstractIn this exploratory study, we considered the method of combining event‐related potentials (ERPs) and source attributions as a means for examining the explicit or implicit nature of second language (L2) knowledge and processing. We recorded electroencephalograms while L2 Spanish participants judged phrase structure and subject‐verb agreement sentences and provided source attributions—guess, intuition, memory, rule. The participants evidenced above chance performance and anterior P600 effects to the stimuli overall. We examined whether ERPs differed by explicit (memory, rule) or implicit (guess, intuition) source attributions. Mixed‐effects models indicated more positive ERPs when the participants indicated explicit source attributions. Thus, the anterior P600 evidenced in our study seemed to reflect subjectively reported explicit knowledge. Future research will be necessary to reproduce this finding, to understand ERP effects that may be associated with implicit knowledge, and to further explore how ERPs may be triangulated with other types of data to better understand the nature of L2.

The Impact of Irritability and Callous Unemotional Traits on Reward Positivity in Youth with ADHD and Conduct Problems.

Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and conduct problems exhibit significant variability in functioning and treatment response that cannot be fully accounted for by differences in symptom severity. Reward responsivity (RR) is a potential transdiagnostic means to account for this variability. Irritability and callous-unemotional (CU) traits moderate associations between both ADHD and conduct problems with multiple realms of functioning. Both are theorized to be associated with RR, but associations in clinical samples are unknown. In 48 youth ages 5-12 with ADHD referred for treatment of conduct problems, we examined RR using a guessing task where participants select a door icon to win and lose money. Analyses focused on the reward positivity (RewP) event-related potential in response to gain and loss feedback, which reliably peaks approximately 300 ms after feedback. Frequentist and Bayesian approaches assessed main effects of ADHD, Conduct Disorder (CD) and non-irritable Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) symptoms with RR, plus interactions between symptoms and affective dimensions (irritability, CU). CD and ODD were hypothesized to be associated with altered RR, with irritability and CU moderating these associations. Across models, a reliable CD x irritability interaction emerged, indicating enhanced RewP when irritability was elevated and CD symptoms were low. CU did not moderate any associations with RR, and little support was found for associations between RR and other symptom domains. As neural response to reward varied with levels of irritability and CD symptoms, RR may hold potential as a clinically-relevant biomarker in youth with ADHD and conduct problems.

Amphetamine alters an EEG marker of reward processing in humans and mice.

The bench-to-bedside development of pro-cognitive therapeutics for psychiatric disorders has been mired by translational failures. This is, in part, due to the absence of pharmacologically sensitive cognitive biomarkers common to humans and rodents. Here, we describe a cross-species translational marker of reward processing that is sensitive to the aminergicagonist, d-amphetamine. Motivated by human electroencephalographic (EEG) findings, we recently reported that frontal midline delta-band power is an electrophysiological biomarker of reward surprise in humans and in mice. In the current series of experiments, we determined the impact of parametric doses of d-amphetamine on this reward-related EEG response from humans (n = 23) and mice (n = 28) performing a probabilistic learning task. In humans, d-amphetamine (placebo, 10mg, 20mg) boosted the Reward Positivity event-related potential (ERP) component as well as the spectral delta-band representations of this signal. In mice, d-amphetamine (placebo, 0.1mg/kg, 0.3mg/kg, 1.0mg/kg) boosted both reward and punishment ERP features, yet there was no modulation of spectral activities. In sum, the present results confirm the role of dopamine in the generation of the Reward Positivity in humans, and pave the way toward a pharmacologically valid biomarker of reward sensitivity across species.

Predicting Definite and Indefinite Referents During Discourse Comprehension: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials.

Linguistic predictions may be generated from and evaluated against a representation of events and referents described in the discourse. Compatible with this idea, recent work shows that predictions about novel noun phrases include their definiteness. In the current follow‐up study, we ask whether people engage similar prediction‐related processes for definite and indefinite referents. This question is relevant for linguistic theories that imply a processing difference between definite and indefinite noun phrases, typically because definiteness is thought to require a uniquely identifiable referent in the discourse. We addressed this question in an event‐related potential (ERP) study (N = 48) with preregistration of data acquisition, preprocessing, and Bayesian analysis. Participants read Dutch mini‐stories with a definite or indefinite novel noun phrase (e.g., “het/een huis,” the/a house), wherein (in)definiteness of the article was either expected or unexpected and the noun was always strongly expected. Unexpected articles elicited enhanced N400s, but unexpectedly indefinite articles also elicited a positive ERP effect at frontal channels compared to expectedly indefinite articles. We tentatively link this effect to an antiuniqueness violation, which may force people to introduce a new referent over and above the already anticipated one. Interestingly, expectedly definite nouns elicited larger N400s than unexpectedly definite nouns (replicating a previous surprising finding) and indefinite nouns. Although the exact nature of these noun effects remains unknown, expectedly definite nouns may have triggered the strongest semantic activation because they alone refer to specific and concrete referents. In sum, results from both the articles and nouns clearly demonstrate that definiteness marking has a rapid effect on processing, counter to recent claims regarding definiteness processing.

Event-related potentials reveal early visual-tactile integration in the deaf

This study examined visual-tactile perceptual integration in deaf and normal hearing individuals. Participants were presented with photos of faces or pictures of an oval in either a visual mode or a visual-tactile mode in a recognition learning task. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded when participants recognized real faces and pictures of ovals in learning stage. Results from the parietal-occipital region showed that photos of faces accompanied with vibration elicited more positive-going ERP responses than photos of faces without vibration as indicated in the components of P1 and N170 in both deaf and hearing individuals. However, pictures of ovals accompanied with vibration produced more positive-going ERP responses than pictures of ovals without vibration in N170, which was only found in deaf individuals. A reversed pattern was shown in the temporal region indicating that real faces with vibration elicited less positive ERPs than photos of faces without vibration in both N170 and N300 for deaf, but such pattern did not appear in N170 and N300 for normal hearing. The results suggest that multisensory integration across the visual and tactile modality involves more fundamental perceptual regions than auditory regions. Moreover, auditory deprivation played an essential role at the perceptual encoding stage of the multisensory integration.