ReviewEvent-related potentials, cognition, and behavior: A biological approach
Section snippets
A cognitive approach and a biological approach
Some trivial statements have non-trivial consequences. One such statement declares the method of event-related brain potentials (ERP) complex. Since the late 1950s, when this method entered the arsenal of psychophysiological techniques, a discussion has revolved around the methodological problems that hang, like Damokles' sword, over all results obtained using this method. These fundamental problems are: signal–noise ratio and the necessity of averaging; influence of extracerebral sources
Slow cortical potentials
Among different varieties of ERPs, slow cortical potentials (SCP) such as the contingent negative variation (CNV: Walter et al., 1964) and the Bereitschaftspotential (Kornhuber and Deecke, 1965) are probably the most well-studied with respect to both physiological origin and functional meaning. On the basis of numerous neurophysiological studies (Caspers et al., 1984, Creutzfeldt and Houchin, 1974, Martin, 1985, Mitzdorf, 1985, Speckmann and Walden, 1991) a theory of SCP (Birbaumer, 1997,
Attention-related negativities reflect feedforward anticipatory activity
As can be seen in the table 1, feedforward processes are supposed to manifest themselves in negative ERP components. Most of these components have been obtained and discussed in relation to the problem of selective attention (for review, see Giard et al., 2000, Herrmann and Knight, 2001, Näätänen, 1992). In such experiments, the space of stimuli is subdivided into two or more subspaces (channels). Subjects should respond to rare targets presented in only one of these subspaces, called the
Conclusion
In order to obtain information necessary for behavioral adjustment, the brain has to ascertain from sensory input whether this information is really present in the environment. ERPs lasting about 200–700 ms are assumed, on the present model, to reflect this process of asking questions and obtaining answers. The feedforward process of ‘formulating’ these questions is related to the anticipatory excitation of the dendrites in superficial cortical layers, and, so, to negative ERP waves such as Nd
Acknowledgements
The author is deeply indebted to Niels Birbaumer, Valentin Braitenberg, J. Scott Jordan, John Polich, and Rolf Verleger, without discussions with whom these ideas would not develop. Jeremy Hill considerably contributed to clarify and precision of language. Some experiments described here were supported by the German Research Society (DFG) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
References (270)
- et al.
Language evolution: neural homologies and neuroinformatics
Neural Network
(2003) - et al.
Response characteristics of peripheral mechanoreceptive units in man: relation to the sensation magnitude and to the subject's task
Electroencephalogr. Clin. Neurophysiol.
(1986) Clinical application of event-related potentials in dementing illness: issues and problems
Int. J. Psychophysiol.
(2000)- et al.
Event-related potentials and the semantic matching of faces
Neuropsychologia
(1989) - et al.
Event-related potentials and the semantic matching of pictures
Brain Cogn.
(1990) - et al.
Event-related potentials and the semantic matching of familiar and unfamiliar faces
Neuropsychologia
(1988) - et al.
Spontaneous EEG theta activity controls frontal visual evoked potential amplitudes
Electroencephalogr. Clin. Neurophysiol.
(1998) - et al.
Event-related oscillations are ‘real brain responses’: wavelet analysis and new strategies
Int. J. Psychophysiol.
(2001) - et al.
The selectively distributed theta system: functions
Int. J. Psychophysiol.
(2001) - et al.
Precortical filtering and selective attention: an evoked potential analysis
Biol. Psychol.
(1990)
Rare events and the CNV—the oddball CNV
Int. J. Psychophysiol.
Event-related potentials, lexical decision and semantic priming
Electroencephalogr. Clin. Neurophysiol.
P300 in response to the subject's own name
Electroencephalogr. Clin. Neurophysiol.
An ERP study of expectancy violation in face perception
Brain Cogn.
Neural aspects of anticipatory behavior
Acta Psychol.
Beyond intuition and instinct blindness: toward an evolutionary rigorous cognitive science
Cognition
Effects of stimulus alternation, repetition and response requirements on event-related potentials to patterned visual stimuli
Biol. Psychol.
Physiological evidence that a masked unrelated intervening item disrupts semantic priming: implications for theories of semantic representation and retrieval models of semantic priming
Brain Lang.
Event-related potentials and psychological theory
Probability interrelations between pre-/post-stimulus intervals and ERD/ERS during a memory task
Clin. Neurophysiol.
The regularities of the discrete nature of multi-variability of EEG spectral patterns
Int. J. Psychophysiol.
Syntactic parsing preferences and their on-line revisions: a spatio-temporal analysis of event-related brain potentials
Cogn. Brain Res.
Transiently evoked otoacoustic emission amplitudes change with changes of directed attention
Physiol. Behav.
An electrophysiological study of scene effects on object identification
Cogn. Brain Res.
The Darwinian status of mind
J. Behav. Ther. Exp. Psychiat.
Auditory selective attention in the human cochlea
Brain Res.
The complementary brain: unifying brain dynamics and modularity
Trends Cogn. Sci.
Focusing on aging: an electrophysiological exploration of spatial and attentional processing during reading
Biol. Psychol.
Attentional influence on the P50 component of the auditory event-related brain potential
Intern. J. Psychophysiol.
What's left if the Jabberwock gets the semantics? An ERP investigation into semantic and syntactic processes during auditory sentence comprehension
Cogn. Brain Res.
Comparison of the N300 and N400 ERPs to picture stimuli in congruent and incongruent contexts
Clin. Neurophysiol.
Event-related potentials: do they reflect central serotonergic neurotransmission and do they predict clinical response to serotonin agonists?
J. Affect. Dis.
Distractor clustering enhances detection speed and accuracy during selective attention
Percep. Psychophys.
Signal clustering modulates auditory cortical activity in humans
Percept. Psychophys.
Perceptual context and the selective attention effect on auditory event-related potentials
Psychophysiology
Processing of auditory stimuli during auditory and visual attention as revealed by event-related potentials
Psychophysiology
More on rational analysis
Behav. Brain Sci.
Olfactory memory: a case study in cognitive psychology
J. Psychol.
Rana computatrix to human language: towards a computational neuroethology of language evolution
Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., Ser. A
Effects of perceptual context on event-related brain potentials during auditory spatial attention
Psychophysiology
Cognitive arithmetic: a review of data and theory
Cognition
Probing cognitive processes through the structure of event-related potentials during learning: an experimental and theoretical analysis
Appl. Optics
Regulation of slow brain potentials affects task performance
Concept identification as a function of preceding negative or positive spontaneous shifts in slow brain potentials
Psychophysiology
Slow scalp recorded brain potentials, sensory processing and cognition
Electrophysiological evidence for task effects on semantic priming in auditory word processing
Psychophysiology
Semantic processing and memory for attended and unattended words in dichotic listening: behavioral and electrophysiological evidence
J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percep. Perform.
An event-related potential (ERP) study of musical expectancy: comparison of musicians with nonmusicians
J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percep. Perform.
The many facets of repetition: a cued-recall and event-related potential analysis of repeating words in same versus difference sentence context
J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn.
Interactivism and genetic epistemology
Arch. Psychol.
Cited by (92)
Semantic priming and neurobiology in schizophrenia: A theoretical review
2021, NeuropsychologiaNeurophysiological basis of the N400 deflection, from Mismatch Negativity to Semantic Prediction Potentials and late positive components
2021, International Journal of PsychophysiologyCitation Excerpt :Therefore, the MMN and N4 might be equifinal in attaining layer I disinhibition amid layer V quiescence, but through alternative means. The two are nonetheless “mismatch negativities” that share critical neurophysiological traits, and might be considered sensory and higher-order variants (Kotchoubey, 2006; Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky, 2019). At the subcellular level, the N4 deflection is largely accounted for by a surge in dendritic plateau potentials that is unaccompanied or unparalleled by firing of layer V somata.
Event-related potentials in an associative word pair learning paradigm
2021, Journal of NeurolinguisticsRevisiting the relationship between the P3b and working memory updating
2019, Biological PsychologyCitation Excerpt :Despite the prevalence of the context updating account (Donchin & Coles, 1988) in the cognitive neuroscience literature (with over 3000 citations), a direct empirical support for the role of WM updating in eliciting the P3b is still missing. In the present study, we aimed to test the idea that the P3b reflects updating of representations in WM. Most EEG researchers would agree that the P3b is associated with processing within WM (Kotchoubey, 2006). However, the predominant and yet unverified account that the P3b reflects the actual updating of WM is used by many to interpret their findings.