CHAPTER 6

I. ERPs and Intellegence

A. Neural Efficiency Hypothesis
B. String Hypothesis

II. ERPs and Stimulus Meaning - see emitted potentials

III. ERPs and Linguistic Processes - see N400

IV. ERPs and Conditioning

A. Classical - evidence less clear than Andreassi indicates

B.Operant - Rockstroh et al. SPs can be made more negative or less positive with visual feedback.

V. ERPs and Attention
Usually studied with auditory stimuli because they are sensitive to simple manipulations of physical changes in the stimuli. The auditory processing negativities have a fronto-central distribution. Distibution and latency is different for visual stimuli.

A.Processing negativities - not clear how many separate components there are, but they seem to be related to an early level of selection based upon processing of simple stimulus parameters such as spatial location, intensity, frequency, etc. versus a later level selection based upon processing of more complex perceptual features.

1.N1 - initially thought to reflect enhancement of exogenous stimulus processing by attention. Later studies suggest that the enhancement with attention is the result of a separate procesing negativity, the early difference wave, that temporally and spatially overlaps with N1.

2. ND - also Late processing negativity

3.N200 or Mismatch Negativity (MMN) - processing negativity response to deviants. N200 is a processing negativity in the attended channel, whereas, MMN may reflect automatic processing related to the orienting response elicited by deviant stimuli in either the attended or unattended channels.

B.P300 and selection - reflects later level of attentional selection than processing negativities later requires a more complex level of analysis.

C.P300 and resource allocation - P300 amplitude to primary task stimuli increases as more perceptual/central attentional resources are required by the primary task, whereas P300 amplitude to secondary task stimuli decreases as more perceptual/central attentional resources are required by the primary task.