scholarly journals The P3b differentiates parallel physical and rule-based updating of a sensory model

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Schwartze ◽  
Francesca I. Bellotti ◽  
Sonja A. Kotz

AbstractThe capacity to form and update mental representations of the type and timing of sensory events is a central tenet of adaptive behavior in a dynamically changing environment. An internal model of stimulus contingencies provides a means to optimize behavior through predictive adjustments based on past to future events. To this end, neural and cognitive processes rely on systematic relations between events and use these rules to optimize information processing. The P3 complex of the event-related potential of the electroencephalogram (ERP/EEG) is a well-established and extensively tested index of such mechanisms. Here we investigated the P3b sensitivity to auditory stimulus deviations associated with two updating operations: physical change (switching stimulus pitches) and rule change (switching additive and subtractive target stimulus counting). Participants listened to a variant of the classical oddball sequence consisting of frequent standard (600 Hz) and two equally probable less frequent deviant tones (660 Hz, 540 Hz), keeping count of the deviant tones and switching between addition and subtraction with a pitch change. The results indicate specific amplitude modulations, confirming the P3b as a context-sensitive marker of physical and cognitive components of an internal model. This suggests that the P3b can be used as a differential marker of predictive coding mechanisms.

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 834-842
Author(s):  
Harini Vasudevan ◽  
Hari Prakash Palaniswamy ◽  
Ramaswamy Balakrishnan

Purpose The main purpose of the study is to explore the auditory selective attention abilities (using event-related potentials) and the neuronal oscillatory activity in the default mode network sites (using electroencephalogram [EEG]) in individuals with tinnitus. Method Auditory selective attention was measured using P300, and the resting state EEG was assessed using the default mode function analysis. Ten individuals with continuous and bothersome tinnitus along with 10 age- and gender-matched control participants underwent event-related potential testing and 5 min of EEG recording (at wakeful rest). Results Individuals with tinnitus were observed to have larger N1 and P3 amplitudes along with prolonged P3 latency. The default mode function analysis revealed no significant oscillatory differences between the groups. Conclusion The current study shows changes in both the early sensory and late cognitive components of auditory processing. The change in the P3 component is suggestive of selective auditory attention deficit, and the sensory component (N1) suggests an altered bottom-up processing in individuals with tinnitus.


2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oscar H. Hernández ◽  
Muriel Vogel-Sprott

A missing stimulus task requires an immediate response to the omission of a regular recurrent stimulus. The task evokes a subclass of event-related potential known as omitted stimulus potential (OSP), which reflects some cognitive processes such as expectancy. The behavioral response to a missing stimulus is referred to as omitted stimulus reaction time (RT). This total RT measure is known to include cognitive and motor components. The cognitive component (premotor RT) is measured by the time from the missing stimulus until the onset of motor action. The motor RT component is measured by the time from the onset of muscle action until the completion of the response. Previous research showed that RT is faster to auditory than to visual stimuli, and that the premotor of RT to a missing auditory stimulus is correlated with the duration of an OSP. Although this observation suggests that similar cognitive processes might underlie these two measures, no research has tested this possibility. If similar cognitive processes are involved in the premotor RT and OSP duration, these two measures should be correlated in visual and somatosensory modalities, and the premotor RT to missing auditory stimuli should be fastest. This hypothesis was tested in 17 young male volunteers who performed a missing stimulus task, who were presented with trains of auditory, visual, and somatosensory stimuli and the OSP and RT measures were recorded. The results showed that premotor RT and OSP duration were consistently related, and that both measures were shorter with respect to auditory stimuli than to visual or somatosensory stimuli. This provides the first evidence that the premotor RT is related to an attribute of the OSP in all three sensory modalities.


Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Segundo-Ortin ◽  
Manuel Heras-Escribano

AbstractA widely shared assumption in the literature about skilled motor behavior is that any action that is not blindly automatic and mechanical must be the product of computational processes upon mental representations. To counter this assumption, in this paper we offer a radical embodied (non-representational) account of skilled action that combines ecological psychology and the Deweyan theory of habits. According to our proposal, skilful performance can be understood as composed of sequences of mutually coherent, task-specific perceptual-motor habits. Such habits play a crucial role in simplifying both our exploration of the perceptual environment and our decision-making. However, we argue that what keeps habits situated, precluding them from becoming rote and automatic, are not mental representations but the agent's conscious attention to the affordances of the environment. It is because the agent is not acting on autopilot but constantly searching for new information for affordances that she can control her behavior, adapting previously learned habits to the current circumstances. We defend that our account provides the resources needed to understand how skilled action can be intelligent (flexible, adaptive, context-sensitive) without having any representational cognitive processes built into them.


Author(s):  
Ton Dijkstra ◽  
Walter J. B. van Heuven

This chapter on the reading of words by multilinguals considers how retrieving words in two or more languages is affected by the lexical properties of the words, the sentence context in which they occur, and the language to which they belong. Reaction time and event-related potential (ERP) studies are discussed that investigate the processing of cognates, interlingual homographs, and words with different numbers of neighbors, both in isolation and in sentence context. After reviewing different models for multilingual word retrieval, it is concluded that multilingual word recognition involves a language-independent, context-sensitive, and interactive pattern recognition routine, with temporal properties that can be determined not only by “classical” reaction time techniques, but even better by up-to-date research techniques such as eye-tracking and ERP recordings.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 1581
Author(s):  
Alexis E. Whitton ◽  
Kathryn E. Lewandowski ◽  
Mei-Hua Hall

Motivational and perceptual disturbances co-occur in psychosis and have been linked to aberrations in reward learning and sensory gating, respectively. Although traditionally studied independently, when viewed through a predictive coding framework, these processes can both be linked to dysfunction in striatal dopaminergic prediction error signaling. This study examined whether reward learning and sensory gating are correlated in individuals with psychotic disorders, and whether nicotine—a psychostimulant that amplifies phasic striatal dopamine firing—is a common modulator of these two processes. We recruited 183 patients with psychotic disorders (79 schizophrenia, 104 psychotic bipolar disorder) and 129 controls and assessed reward learning (behavioral probabilistic reward task), sensory gating (P50 event-related potential), and smoking history. Reward learning and sensory gating were correlated across the sample. Smoking influenced reward learning and sensory gating in both patient groups; however, the effects were in opposite directions. Specifically, smoking was associated with improved performance in individuals with schizophrenia but impaired performance in individuals with psychotic bipolar disorder. These findings suggest that reward learning and sensory gating are linked and modulated by smoking. However, disorder-specific associations with smoking suggest that nicotine may expose pathophysiological differences in the architecture and function of prediction error circuitry in these overlapping yet distinct psychotic disorders.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Michael Orquiola Galang ◽  
Sukhvinder S. Obhi ◽  
Michael Jenkins

Previous neurophysiological research suggests that there are event-related potential (ERP) components are associated with empathy for pain: early affective component (N2) and two late cognitive components (P3/LPP). The current study investigated whether and how the visual perspective from which a painful event is observed affects these ERP components. Participants viewed images of hands in pain vs. not in pain from a first-person or third-person perspective. We found that visual perspective influences both the early and late components. In the early component (N2), there was a larger mean amplitude during observation of pain vs no-pain exclusively when images were shown from a first-person perspective. We suggest that this effect may be driven by misattributing the on-screen hand to oneself. For the late component (P3), we found a larger effect of pain on mean amplitudes in response to third-person relative to first-person images. We speculate that the P3 may reflect a later process that enables effective recognition of others’ pain in the absence of misattribution. We discuss our results in relation to self- vs other-related processing by questioning whether these ERP components are truly indexing empathy (an other-directed process) or a simple misattribution of another’s pain as one’s own (a self-directed process).


2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-280
Author(s):  
Jianfeng Wang ◽  
Yan Wu ◽  
Lushi Jing

Implicit motives play an important role in the regulation of many basic cognitive processes, particularly in the stage of attention. We conducted a study with a sample of 58 college students to examine selective attention to emotional stimuli as a function of individual differences in the implicit need for affiliation (nAff). In an affective oddball paradigm, event-related potentials were recorded while participants viewed positive, neutral, and negative images of people. Results showed that individuals high in nAff elicited larger late positive potential amplitudes to negative images than those low in nAff did. These findings replicate and extend the results of a previous study focused on these relationships and provide additional information on the neural correlates of affiliation-related emotional information processing.


Author(s):  
Ebrahim Oshni Alvandi

One way to evaluate cognitive processes in living or nonliving systems is by using the notion of “information processing”. Emotions as cognitive processes orient human beings to recognize, express and display themselves or their wellbeing through dynamical and adaptive form of information processing. In addition, humans behave or act emotionally in an embodied environment. The brain embeds symbols, meaning and purposes for emotions as well. So any model of natural or autonomous emotional agents/systems needs to consider the embodied features of emotions that are processed in an informational channel of the brain or a processing system. This analytical and explanatory study described in this chapter uses the pragmatic notion of information to develop a theoretical model for emotions that attempts to synthesize some essential aspects of human emotional processing. The model holds context-sensitive and purpose-based features of emotional pattering in the brain. The role of memory is discussed and an idea of control parameters that have roles in processing environmental variables in emotional patterning is introduced.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 168781401880320
Author(s):  
Ya-feng Niu ◽  
Yi Xie ◽  
Cheng-qi Xue ◽  
Hai-yan Wang ◽  
Wen-zhe Tang ◽  
...  

To investigate and compare the common features and differences of the cognitive processes, during which interfaces with diverse similarities are evaluated, this article chose the color code and layout forms of digital interface to carry out further research. The study adopted the visual Oddball experimental paradigm that was based on the event-related potential technique and integrated the behavioral and event-related potential data to analyze the neural features of the cognitive process when two coding forms were individually processed. The result reveals that there were P300 components, elicited by the target stimuli, in both of the two experiment sessions. The average amplitude of P300 positively correlates the similarities between the target and standard stimuli, with its latency positively correlating the overall complexity of the stimuli. In the color experiment session, there was apparent visual mismatching negativity around 200 ms after the present of the target, which is related with the early attention. The empirical significance of conclusions drawn in this study is listed as follows: first, it can help to effectively evaluate the usability of guiding features in the digital interfaces through the investigation on visual mismatching negativity elicited in the early attention process; second, the amplitude and latency of the P300 component can be applied in the evaluation and filtering of design schemes, which is based on the similarities perceived in the iterative process and this would enhance efficiency of user interface designers.


2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (12) ◽  
pp. 2005-2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Giesbrecht ◽  
Jocelyn L. Sy ◽  
James C. Elliott

When two masked targets are presented in rapid succession, correct identification of the first target (T1) leads to a dramatic impairment in identification of the second target (T2). Several studies of this so-called attentional blink (AB) phenomenon have provided behavioral and physiological evidence that T2 is processed to the semantic level, despite the profound impairment in T2 report. These findings have been interpreted as an example of perception without awareness and have been explained by models that assume that T2 is processed extensively even though it does not gain access into consciousness. The present study reports two experiments that test this assumption. In Experiment 1, the perceptual load of the T1 task was manipulated and T2 was a word that was either related or unrelated to a context word presented at the beginning of each trial. The event-related potential (ERP) technique was used to isolate the context-sensitive N400 component evoked by the T2 word. The ERP data revealed that there was a complete suppression of the N400 during the AB when the perceptual load was high, but not when perceptual load was low. Experiment 2 replicated the high-load condition of Experiment 1 while ruling out two alternative explanations for the reduction of the N400 during the AB. The results of both experiments demonstrate that word meanings are not always accessed during the AB and are consistent with studies that suggest that attention can act to select information at multiple stages of processing depending on concurrent task demands.


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