Event Related Potential

To summarise, both the context closure and context updating theories were proposed, post hoc, to provide possible functional accounts of the P3b based on data concerning its antecedent conditions. Both theories, therefore, appear to be able to account for the present experimental data. The reason this is possible is that both theories are quite vague and general which makes it difficult to test specific predictions from them. The major difference between the two theories is that Verleger suggests that P3b is elicited when an expected stimulus is presented, whereas Donchin and Coles propose that a P3b is elicited when the schema of the current context requires revision because of the presentation of an unexpected or distinctive event. Knowledge of whether subjects expect or do not expect the rare P3b eliciting events is therefore crucial for evaluating the plausibility of these two theories. Donchin presents evidence in favour of the rare stimuli being unexpected but Verleger cites the "gamblers fallacy" (predicting an alternation after a run of one stimulus even though the subject knows the probability on each trial is 0.5) as evidence of the rare stimulus being expected. More systematic studies of the relation of expectancy to the P3b are necessary.

(Montague and Walker-Andrews, 2002). As such, it makes sense that maternal emotional states and traits predict the social and emotional experiences that infants encounter during social interaction (Belsky and Barends, 2002). We can therefore propose that infant experiences are also shaped by parental psychological health. Supporting this, differences in maternal psychological health in a typical cohort have been found to affect infant face interest at 3.5-months (Jones, Slade, Pascalis, & Herbert, 2013) possibly due to mothers with a diagnosis of depression illustrating a withdrawn and muted style of interacting with their infants, with a diminished positive affective response (Field et al., 2009). Moreover, there is good evidence suggesting that at later stages of development emotional face processing is altered among children and adults with behavioural and affective disorders (Dolan & Fullam, 2006; Sinzig, Morsch, & Lehmkuhl, 2008): for example, individuals with high state anxiety respond stronger to fearful stimuli (Bishop, Duncan, & Lawrence, 2004), and high trait anxiety has been related to the altered processing of emotional information from both the face and voice (Koizumi et al., 2011).

Neuroimaging studies have provided neuroanatomical evidence underlying the lower performance on the Go/NoGo task in schizophrenia patients. For example, increased activations in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are consis- tently observed during the performance of the NoGo condition of the Go/NoGo task in normal controls [4,5], whereas activations in these brain structures are signifi- cantly reduced in schizophrenia patients relative to con- trols [6,7]. In addition, structural abnormalities in the ACC and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex have been reported in schizophrenia patients [8,9]. These findings suggest that the impaired performance on the Go/NoGo task observed in schizophrenia patients might be related to structural and functional abnormalities of frontal ar- eas.

noradrenaline levels (Mitchel, MacDonald, & Brodie, 2004). Participants were presented with pairs of human face images comprising of a neutral (happy or neutral) expression and a threat-related expression (fear, anger disgust). After the presentation of the stimuli, a probe appeared behind the target image which participants had to respond to. Using reaction time as a behavioural measure of attentional bias, if participants responded consistently faster to probes behind threat-related emotional faces this was considered evidence of attentional bias to threat, as per previous studies of a similar nature (Cisler & Koster, 2010; Mogg & Bradley, 1988). The results of Carr and Colleague’s study suggested that females had greater arousal reactivity (indexed by noradrenaline) to the stress task, and a concomitant increase in attentional bias towards threat, following the stress task compared to the males who did not react to the acute stressor. Interestingly, they found that females exhibited an attentional avoidance at baseline. This finding was unexpected and requires replication.

The marginality of statistical significance led to the speculation in that the word category effect might dilute the sense effect in the experiment. Many studies, in general, suggested that the neural systems for lexical processing of nouns and verbs were anatomically distinct. For example, in child- ren ’ s lexical development, the acquisition of nouns seems to be earlier and easier than that of verbs (Gentner, 1982). In aphasic findings, case studies indicated that patients with lesions located in left anterior and middle temporal lobe, outside so called language areas, had difficulty in the produc- tion of nouns whereas patients with lesions areas in left frontal premotor cortex had difficulty in the production of verbs (Damasio & Damasio, 1992; Damasio et al., 1993). Evidence from event-related potentials also disclosed electrocortical differences between nouns and verbs over widespread cortical areas (Pulvermüller et al., 1999). Therefore, verbs were assumed to elicit stronger electrocortical ac- tivity around primary frontal, prefrontal areas as- sociated with motor, premotor functions. Nouns, associated with concrete and well-imaginable meanings related to visual modality, were assumed to elicit larger electrocortical activity around visual cortices.

Hepatic encephalopathy is a potentially reversible, metabolically caused disturbance of central nervous system function that occurs in patients with acute or chronic liver disease. MHE is defined as HE without symptoms on clinical/neurological examination, but with deficits in some cognitive areas that can only be measured by neu- ropsychometric testing [1]. MHE has a high frequency among patients with liver cirrhosis (22% - 74%) and also occurs in patients with non cirrhotic liver disease such as portal vein thrombosis [2] or portosystemic shunt [3]. The true frequency of patients with MHE is unknown, firstly because the diagnostic criteria in use around the world are not entirely uniform, and secondly because MHE often remains undiagnosed due to the lack of evident symptoms [4]. However, numerous studies have shown that, although the neurological symptoms are slight, af- fected patients are markedly impaired in their quality of life and ability to work [5]. Various tools have been evaluated for the diagnosis of MHE including neuropsychological tests, neurophysiological tests as auditory brain stem response, p300 event, regional cerebral blood flow changes [6], magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy [7]. Several hypotheses attempt to explain the etiopathophysiology of HE. Metabolic products from the intestine are normally metabolized in the liver. However, in people with significant liver disease, im- paired hepatic detoxification leads to systemic accumulation of by-products of gut metabolism, specifically ammonia [8]. Zinc is integrally involved in the metabolism of ammonia. Zinc deficiency markedly decreases the activity of the urea cycle enzyme, ornithine transcarbamylase, and zinc supplementation corrects this [9]. Simi- larly, zinc deficiency has been reported to impair activity of muscle glutamine synthetase, which causes hyper- ammonemia [10]. Glutamine synthetase activity has also been reported to be decreased in patients with hepatic encephalopathy [11].

Abstract—Parametric modeling strategies are explored in conjunction with linear discriminant analysis for use in an elec- troencephalogram (EEG)-based brain–computer interface (BCI). A left/right self-paced typing exercise is analyzed by extending the usual autoregressive (AR) model for EEG feature extraction with an AR with exogenous input (ARX) model for combined filtering and feature extraction. The ensemble averaged Bere- itschaftspotential (an event related potential preceding the onset of movement) forms the exogenous signal input to the ARX model. Based on trials with six subjects, the ARX case of modeling both the signal and noise was found to be considerably more effective than modeling the noise alone (common in BCI systems) with the AR method yielding a classification accuracy of 52.8 4.8% and the ARX method an accuracy of 79.1 3.9% across subjects. The results suggest a role for ARX-based feature extraction in BCIs based on evoked and event-related potentials.

Studies regarding N400 demonstrate that potentials of EEG electrodes in each hemisphere are not symmetrically distributed [13] [21] [22]. Consistent with Kutas, et al. [22] results, our experiment shows that unrelated words elicit stronger potentials on the right hemisphere, but not related words, even if left hemisphere is considered significant in language comprehension. In suppression condition, this phenomenon is attenuated by continuous flash suppression. Right hemisphere is also important in noticing anomalous words in priming context [23]. Another experiment finds that both hemispheres exhibit similar responses to different ranges of message constraint sentences, more or less pre- dictable in N400 component [24]. An fMRI study shows that invisible words or sentences could be discriminated in left posterior superior temporal sulcus and left middle frontal gyrus [25]. These results may suggest that both hemispheres are critical in language expectation and comprehension but right hemisphere might involve more in processing of unexpected or unrelated word. Thus, brain activity distribution symmetry is a possible index depicting processing of seman- tic analysis taking place in visual pathway.

significant, so the lack of an observed group difference cannot be attributed to participants’ general lack to engage with the precue information. Some evidence for differences in brain activity between groups was observed. First, the CNV amplitude seemed generally slightly enlarged for musicians compared to non- musicians, although this effect was not significant. Also, only musicians, but not non-musicians, exhibited a significant foreperiod LRP when response hand was pre-specified. Importantly, lateralized activity during the response phase (target- related LRP) did not differ between groups. Together, these LRP findings are surprising, especially given that no behavioural differences in the size of the precue effect were found between groups. Given that the target-related LRP was of similar size for both groups, differences in the foreperiod LRP amplitude cannot have resulted from structural differences between groups. In order to further explore the link between behavioural results and the foreperiod LRP, we run a correlation between the size of the foreperiod LRP precue effect (no information precue minus hand information precue) and the hand precue effect in RTs (no information precue minus hand information precue) across all participants, discarding factor group. The correlation was not significant, r = 0.02. We will come back to discussing this finding in more detail in the general discussion.

This has led many researchers to conclude that there exists two separate inhibitory cueing mechanisms (discussed further in Section 1.2): (1) inhibition that is generated along input pathways (sensory/perceptual) that can be observed when the oculomotor system is suppressed (i.e., eyes remain fixated) and thought to be a short lasting effect, and (2) a longer lasting inhibition that is generated along output pathways that can be observed when the oculomotor system is activated (i.e., a saccade is required to the cue or target; Hilchey, Klein, & Satel, 2014). Some researchers have argued that only inhibition in output pathways can be considered ‘true’ IOR as a mechanism for orienting during visual search would need to be closely related to oculomotor activation (Hilchey et al., 2014). Other researchers have argued that in fact all observed inhibition is input based (Fecteau & Munoz 2005). That is, inhibition is caused at a sensory or perceptual level and, as a result, delays processing all the way through to the output stage. Indeed, sensory, perceptual, attentional and motoric factors have all been shown to elicit inhibition on cued trials (Berlucchi, 2006). Thus, to stay theoretically neutral, the current study will employ the term “inhibitory cueing effect” (ICE) to denote any slowed RTs due to the appearance of a cue in the same location as a target (Hilchey et al., 2014). Observed inhibition that is thought to be generated closer to input pathways will be referred to as input ICEs and those thought to be generated closer to output pathways will be referred to as output ICEs.

Another interesting result of the current study was that there was a significant main effect of emotional states, (F[1,16] = 5.33, p = < 0.05, partial η 2 = 0.250) in 500 - 600 ms for the LPP, which shows the mechanism of processing the incongruent emotion were different with congruent emotion. There were interaction (F[1,16] = 5.42, p = < 0.05, partial η 2 = 0.253) among emotional states , cue validity and target location in the 500 - 600 ms time window for the LPP, further analysis suggest that no matter what the cue validity was the effect of emo- tional conflict was significant different in right side target location, which shown the right side dominant. A possible explanation is that the priming associated with the congruent emotional state was reflective of residual activation of the neural cluster for the preceding face context which overlapped with the subsequent congruent arousal face [31]. This may have facilitated the processing of the target face, enabling the participant to use more cognitive resources to deal with the incongruent task, thereby resulting in greater positive potential for the incongruent emotional condition. For the right side dominance, the result is consistent with the previous studies [32] [33], according to Welsh and Elliott’s response activation model, the cues activate response codes for movement in that direction, so the right side dominance occurred, a saccadic eye movements got similar results [34].

In this study, we measured event-related potential (ERP) responses to onomatopoeias (imitative words and mimetic words) and common words. Previous studies have shown that onomatopoeias are cognitively processed differently than common words. However, whether the temporal as- pects of cognitive processing differ between onomatopoeias and common words remains unclear. The amplitude of the late positive complex (LPC), an index of sustained cognitive processing, of the ERP response to onomatopoeias was smaller than that for common words. In addition, the differ- ence in the amplitude of the LPC between onomatopoeias and common words appeared from 200 ms until 900 ms after stimulus onset, suggesting that onomatopoeias do not require obligatory at- tentional capture or continued processing and encoding. Furthermore, marked differences be- tween onomatopoeias and common words were evident in the early stages of cognitive processing. These results suggest that the temporal aspects of cognitive processing differ between onomato- poeias and common words.

Event related potentials (ERPs) are electroencephalo- graphic changes that are time-locked to sensory and cognitive events and represent the neurophysiologic pro- cessing of these events [18]. ERPs reflect the activation of neural structures in the sensory cortex, cortical asso- ciation areas and higher order cognitive areas [19]. They measure basic sensory processing abilities related to cognition and have been used successfully in studying the effects of malaria in Kenya [20]. In children, the P1, the N2 and the P3a are the typical components observed in an auditory novelty oddball [21-23]. In a visual para- digm, the common components in children are the N1 [24], the P2 [25], the P3a [26] and the Nc [27,28] at midline electrodes and, if face stimuli are used, a face- sensitive N170 at occipito-temporal sites [29]. Previous studies suggest that these ERP components may be clinically useful as an index of cognitive function [30]. We therefore recorded novelty processing in the audi- tory and visual modality and compared children with and without prior history of PM.

to replicate switch costs, and determine whether switch-related ERPs occur, when a person switches between responding truthfully and responding deceptively, as knowledge of these could lead to the development of a new method of lie detection, using a modified task switching paradigm. If this procedure were to be successful, it would not rely on detecting nondiagnostic signs of lying such as increased arousal or cognitive load (both of which may be increased or reduced due to factors other than deception), nor would it rely on an orienting or recognition response, which may be elicited or fail to occur due to factors other than guilt or innocence. Rather, it would rely on detecting the specific signs of sincerity switching to determine whether an individual is responding truthfully to all questions, or if, on crime questions, they are answering deceptively. Response times are susceptible to countermeasures,

Cite this article as: Claire D. Monroy, Sarah A. Gerson, Estefanía Domínguez- Martínez, Katharina Kaduk, Sabine Hunnius and Vincent Reid, Sensitivity to structure in action sequences: An infant event-related potential study, Neuropsychologia, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.05.007 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting galley proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.

irrelevant spider distractors. For example, research has found that people with a high fear of spiders had greater colour naming latencies in the original Stroop task when there was a spider in the same room as them compared to when there was no spider (Kwakkenbos, Becker, & Rinck, 2010). Slowed colour naming in the spider-related Stroop paradigms has been attributed to a prioritised attentional processing of threat- related information which interferes with the goal of naming the colour (Williams et al., 1996). Kindt and Brosschot (1997) also found that people with a phobia of spiders displayed greater reaction times to spider-related stimuli in pictorial and linguistic Stroop tasks, and this was found despite the fact that participants rated the pictures as more aversive than the words. This suggests that when faced with

The combination of eye tracking and EEG within one experiment has increased in recent years, especially in adult research, as both knowledge and technology have evolved. Simultaneous recordings of eye tracking and EEG are currently used to get new insights about cognition and human behaviour that are not possible without the combination of the two sources of information (e.g., Kulke, Atkinson, & Brad- dick, 2016a) and also for methodological purposes (e.g., Ahtola, Stjerna, Stevenson, & Vanhatalo, 2017). One of the fastest recent methodological developments has oc- curred in the area of eye-fixation-related potentials (EFRPs). EFRPs overcome the challenge of avoiding eye movements during ERP studies and thus, allow the mea- surement of brain responses with free-viewing stimuli. Eye tracking data are used to calculate fixation locations and onset times. Each fixation onset becomes the onset of an EFRP trial, measuring the brain response during the fixation time (i.e., eyes are still). This allows the acquisition of EFRP epochs that are not contaminated by eye movements while allowing the participant to perform more natural behaviour during the experiment. This methodology first started in reading ERP research (Dimigen, Sommer, Hohlfeld, Jacobs, & Kliegl, 2011) and, in the last years, other areas of research such as visual search (Kamienkowski, Ison, Quiroga, & Sigman, 2012; Kaunitz et al., 2014; Weaver, Clayton Hickey, & van Zoest, 2017) or affec- tive processing of natural scenes (Simola, Le Fevre, Torniainen, & Baccino, 2015) have also used this methodology successfully. According to the knowledge of the author, EFRP has not been applied to infants to date. This is most likely due to the complexity of the methodology and the requirement of obtaining high-quality eye tracking data in order to accurately compute the fixation onset times.

Despite the importance of studying brain function to identify subtle or underlying processes, only two papers have examined ERPs in the RAVLT (Babiloni et al., 2009, 2010). Babiloni et al. (2009) recorded intracerebral electrical activity in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy during the recall phase of the RAVLT, and examined event-related synchronization in the theta band for words which were recalled vs. words which were not recalled. In 2010, they presented traditional ERP analyses of the same participants, with a late positive peak apparent around 350 ms post-stimulus being larger for recalled than unrecalled words. While these results are in line with expectations for memory tasks as reviewed below, they are not easily generalizable to a wider population. Firstly, as epilepsy patients have abnormal patterns of brain activity, it is difficult to predict the pattern of brain activity in healthy control participants, much less potential differences in substance abusing individuals. Secondly, intracerebral recording techniques are less sensitive to noise than scalp-recorded ERPs. Lastly, presumably because of time and posture constraints associated with neurosurgery, the recognition portion of the RAVLT was not performed.

Nicotine is a psychoactive substance that is commonly consumed in the context of music. However, the reason why music and nicotine are co-consumed is uncertain. One possibility is that nicotine affects cognitive processes relevant to aspects of music appreciation in a beneficial way. Here we investigated this possibility using Event- Related Potentials (ERPs). Participants underwent a simple decision-making task (to maintain attentional focus), responses to which were signaled by auditory stimuli. Unlike previous research looking at the effects of nicotine on auditory processing, we used complex tones that varied in pitch, a fundamental element of music. In addition, unlike most other studies, we tested non-smoking subjects to avoid withdrawal-related complications. We found that nicotine (4.0 mg, administered as gum) increased P2 amplitude in the frontal region. Since a decrease in P2 amplitude and latency is related to habituation processes, and an enhanced ability to disengage from irrelevant stimuli, our findings suggest that nicotine may cause a reduction in habituation, resulting in non- smokers being less able to adapt to repeated stimuli. A corollary of that decrease in adaptation may be that nicotine extends the temporal window during which a listener is able and willing to engage with a piece of music.

This brief review indicates that insight involves complex cognitive processes as reflected in activation in multiple regions of brain (Luo, 2004; Qiu et al., 2008). For the electrophysio- logical substrates of insight, there has been only one component (N380 or N320) observed that may reflect the process of breaking mental set or cognitive conflict (Mai et al., 2004; Qiu et al., 2006). Although it is indispensable to break the mental set in order to reach insight, the formation of novel association may be crucial to insight as well (Bowden & Beeman, 2003 & 2007; Beeman, et al., 2004; Luo, 2004; Luo & Niki, 2003; Luo, Niki, & Phillips, 2004), as insight is one form of creativity. So far no study has looked at how novel association is reflected in the ERPs. One possibility is that there are mulitple ERP re- sponses under the catalyzed paradigm associated with breaking mental set and new association formation. Thus, it is hypothe- sized that an ERP response similar to N380 or N320 will be elicited, which may reflect breaking mental set, later, some more ERP effects would be observed which may be related to new association formation.