Event-related potentials (ERPs) have been used for decades to study perception, cognition, emotion, neurological and psychiatric disorders, and lifespan development. ERPs consist of multiple components and reflect a specific neurocognitive process. In the past, there was no single source that could be consulted to learn about all the major ERP components; learning about a single ERP component required reading dozens or even hundreds of separate journal articles and book chapters. The Oxford Handbook of Event-Related Potential Components fills this void with a detailed review of the major ERP components. The book looks at the fundamental nature of ERP components, including essential information about how ERP components are defined and isolated. It explains in detail individual components, such as the N170, P300, and ERN. It further examines groups of related components within specific research domains, such as language, emotion, and memory. Finally, it analyses ERP components in special populations, including children, the elderly, nonhuman primates, and patients with neurological disorders, affective disorders, and schizophrenia.
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The event-related potential (ERP) approach has provided a wealth of fine-grained information about the time course and the neural basis of cognitive processing events. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, an increasing number of researchers began to realize that an ERP only represents a certain part of the event-related electroencephalographic (EEG) signal. This chapter focuses on another aspect of event-related EEG activity: oscillatory EEG activity. There exists a meaningful relationship between oscillatory neuronal dynamics, on the one hand, and a wide range of cognitive processes, on the other hand. Given that the analysis of oscillatory dynamics extracts information from the EEG/magnetoencephalographic (EEG/MEG) signal that is largely lost with the traditional time-locked averaging of single trials used in the ERP approach, studying the dynamic oscillatory patterns in the EEG/MEG is at least a useful addition to the traditional ERP approach.
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Using event-related potentials (ERPs), this study examines how trait information inferred from behaviors is associated with person names. In linguistic discourses, person names were associated with descriptions of either positive or negative behaviors. In a subsequent explicit evaluation task, the previously described person names were presented in isolation, and the participants were asked to judge the emotional valence of these names. We found that the names associated with positive descriptions elicited a larger positivity in the ERP than the names associated with negative descriptions. The results indicate that the emotional valence of person names attached to person perception can be dynamically influenced by short descriptions of the target person, probably due to trait inference based on the provided behavioral descriptions.
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This study provides ERP and oscillatory dynamics data associated with the comprehension of narratives involving counterfactual events. Participants were given short stories describing an initial situation ("Marta wanted to plant flowers in her garden...."), followed by a critical sentence describing a new situation in either a factual ("Since she found a spade, she started to dig a hole") or counterfactual format ("If she had found a spade, she would have started to dig a hole"), and then a continuation sentence that was either related to the initial situation ("she bought a spade") or to the new one ("she planted roses"). The ERPs recorded for the continuation sentences related to the initial situation showed larger negativity after factuals than after counterfactuals, suggesting that the counterfactual's presupposition - the events did not occur - prevents updating the here-and-now of discourse. By contrast, continuation sentences related to the new situation elicited similar ERPs under both factual and counterfactual contexts, suggesting that counterfactuals also activate momentarily an alternative "as if" meaning. However, the reduction of gamma power following counterfactuals, suggests that the "as if" meaning is not integrated into the discourse, nor does it contribute to semantic unification processes.
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Emotional reactions to marketing stimuli are essential to tourist destination marketing, yet difficult to validly measure. A neuromarketing experiment was peformed to establish whether brain event-related potentials (ERPs), elicited by destination photos, can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of tourist destination marketing content in movies. Two groups of participants viewed pictures from the cities of Bruges and Kyoto. Prior to viewing the pictures, one group saw an excerpt from the movie In Bruges, which positively depicts Bruges’ main tourist attractions. The other group saw a movie excerpt that did not feature Bruges (the Rum Diary). An early emotional response was osberved to the subsequently presented Bruges pictures for the In Bruges group only; no reliable between-group differences were found in ERPs to pictures from Kyoto. In conclusion, EEG-based neuromarketing is a valuable tool for evaluating the effectiveness of destination marketing, and popular movies can positively influence affective destination image.
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Previous event-related potentials (ERP) studies on the processing of emotional information in sentence/discourse context have yielded inconsistent findings. An important reason for the discrepancies is the different lexico-semantic properties of the emotional words. The present study controlled for the lexico-semantic meaning of emotional information by endowing the same person names with either positive or negative valence. ERPs were computed for positively and negatively valenced person names that were either congruent or incongruent to previous emotional contexts. We found that positive names elicited an N400 effect while negative names elicited a P600 effect in response to the incongruence. These results suggest that the integration of positive and negative information into emotional context exhibits different time courses, with a relatively delayed integration for negative information. Our study demonstrates that using person names constitutes a new and improved tool for investigating the integration of emotional information into context.
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Both emotional words and words focused by information structure can capture attention. This study examined the interplay between emotional salience and information structure in modulating attentional resources in the service of integrating emotional words into sentence context. Event-related potentials (ERPs) to affectively negative, neutral, and positive words, which were either focused or nonfocused in question-answer pairs, were evaluated during sentence comprehension. The results revealed an early negative effect (90-200 ms), a P2 effect, as well as an effect in the N400 time window, for both emotional salience and information structure. Moreover, an interaction between emotional salience and information structure occurred within the N400 time window over right posterior electrodes, showing that information structure influences the semantic integration only for neutral words, but not for emotional words. This might reflect the fact that the linguistic salience of emotional words can override the effect of information structure on the integration of words into context. The interaction provides evidence for attention-emotion interactions at a later stage of processing. In addition, the absence of interaction in the early time window suggests that the processing of emotional information is highly automatic and independent of context. The results suggest independent attention capture systems of emotional salience and information structure at the early stage but an interaction between them at a later stage, during the semantic integration of words.
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Gamma-band neuronal synchronization during sentence-level language comprehension has previously been linked with semantic unification. Here, we attempt to further narrow down the functional significance of gamma during language comprehension, by distinguishing between two aspects of semantic unification: successful integration of word meaning into the sentence context, and prediction of upcoming words. We computed eventrelated potentials (ERPs) and frequency band-specific electroencephalographic (EEG) power changes while participants read sentences that contained a critical word (CW) that was (1) both semantically congruent and predictable (high cloze, HC), (2) semantically congruent but unpredictable (low cloze, LC), or (3) semantically incongruent (and therefore also unpredictable; semantic violation, SV). The ERP analysis showed the expected parametric N400 modulation (HC < LC < SV). The time-frequency analysis showed qualitatively different results. In the gamma-frequency range, we observed a power increase in response to the CW in the HC condition, but not in the LC and the SV conditions. Additionally, in the theta frequency range we observed a power increase in the SV condition only. Our data provide evidence that gamma power increases are related to the predictability of an upcoming word based on the preceding sentence context, rather than to the integration of the incoming word's semantics into the preceding context. Further, our theta band data are compatible with the notion that theta band synchronization in sentence comprehension might be related to the detection of an error in the language input.
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To highlight relevant information in dialogues, both wh-question context and pitch accent in answers can be used, such that focused information gains more attention and is processed more elaborately. To evaluate the relative influence of context and pitch accent on the depth of semantic processing, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) to auditorily presented wh-question-answer pairs. A semantically incongruent word in the answer occurred either in focus or in non-focus position as determined by the context, and this word was either accented or unaccented.Semantic incongruency elicited different N400 effects in different conditions. The largest N400 effect was found when the question-marked focus was accented, while the other three conditions elicited smaller N400 effects. The results suggest that context and accentuation interact. Thus accented focused words were processed more deeply compared to conditions where focus and accentuation mismatched, or when the new information had no marking. In addition, there seems to be sex differences in the depth of semantic processing. For males, a significant N400 effect was observed only when the question-marked focus was accented, reduced N400 effects were found in the other dialogues. In contrast, females produced similar N400 effects in all the conditions. These results suggest that regardless of external cues, females tend to engage in more elaborate semantic processing compared to males.
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The colour-word Stroop task and the picture-word interference task (PWI) have been used extensively to study the functional processes underlying spoken word production. One of the consistent behavioural effects in both tasks is the Stroop-like effect: The reaction time (RT) is longer on incongruent trials than on congruent trials. The effect in the Stroop task is usually linked to word planning, whereas the effect in the PWI task is associated with either word planning or perceptual encoding. To adjudicate between the word planning and perceptual encoding accounts of the effect in PWI, we conducted an EEG experiment consisting of three tasks: a standard colour-word Stroop task (three colours), a standard PWI task (39 pictures), and a Stroop-like version of the PWI task (three pictures). Participants overtly named the colours and pictures while their EEG was recorded. A Stroop-like effect in RTs was observed in all three tasks. ERPs at centro-parietal sensors started to deflect negatively for incongruent relative to congruent stimuli around 350 ms after stimulus onset for the Stroop, Stroop-like PWI, and the Standard PWI tasks: an N400 effect. No early differences were found in the PWI tasks. The onset of the Stroop-like effect at about 350 ms in all three tasks links the effect to word planning rather than perceptual encoding, which has been estimated in the literature to be finished around 200-250 ms after stimulus onset. We conclude that the Stroop-like effect arises during word planning in both Stroop and PWI.
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