Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain—3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging, J. Talairach, P. Tournoux. Georg Thieme Verlag, New York (1988), 122 pp., 130 figs. DM 268

The event-related potential (ERP) technique in cognitive neuroscience allows scientists to observe human brain activity that reflects specific cognitive processes. In An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique, Steve Luck offers the first comprehensive guide to the practicalities of conducting ERP experiments in cognitive neuroscience and related fields, including affective neuroscience and experimental psychopathology. The book can serve as a guide for the classroom or the laboratory and as a reference for researchers who do not conduct ERP studies themselves but need to understand and evaluate ERP experiments in the literature. It summarizes the accumulated body of ERP theory and practice, providing detailed, practical advice about how to design, conduct, and interpret ERP experiments, and presents the theoretical background needed to understand why an experiment is carried out in a particular way. Luck focuses on the most fundamental techniques, describing them as they are used in many of the world's leading ERP laboratories. These techniques reflect a long history of electrophysiological recordings and provide an excellent foundation for more advanced approaches. The book also provides advice on the key topic of how to design ERP experiments so that they will be useful in answering questions of broad scientific interest. This reflects the increasing proportion of ERP research that focuses on these broader questions rather than the "ERPology" of early studies, which concentrated primarily on ERP components and methods. Topics covered include the neural origins of ERPs, signal averaging, artifact rejection and correction, filtering, measurement and analysis, localization, and the practicalities of setting up the lab.

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An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique

EEG alpha oscillations: The inhibition–timing hypothesis

This paper reviews the literature on the Nl wave of the human auditory evoked potential. It concludes that at least six different cerebral processes can contribute to (he negative wave recorded from the scalp with a peak latency between 50 and 150 ms: a component generated in the auditory-cortex on the supratemporal plane, a component generated in the association cortex on the lateral aspect of the temporal and parietal cortex, a component generated in the motor and premotor cortices, the mismatch negativity, a temporal component of the processing negativity, and a frontal component of the processing negativity, The first three, which can be considered ‘true’ N1 components, are controlled by the physical and temporal aspects of the stimulus and by the general state of the subject. The other three components are not necessarily elicited by a stimulus but depend on the conditions in which the stimulus occurs. They often last much longer than the true N1 components that they overlap.

The N1 wave of the human electric and magnetic response to sound: a review and an analysis of the component structure

The mismatch negativity (MMN) in basic research of central auditory processing: a review.

Endogeneous brain potentials associated with selective auditory attention

Steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) were recorded from the scalp of human subjects who were cued to attend to a rapid sequence of alphanumeric characters presented to one visual half-field while ignoring a concurrent sequence of characters in the opposite half-field. These two-character sequences were each superimposed upon a small square background that was flickered at a rate of 8.6 Hz in one half-field and 12 Hz in the other half-field. The amplitude of the frequency-coded SSVEP elicited by either of the task-irrelevant flickering backgrounds was significantly enlarged when attention was focused upon the character sequence at the same location. This amplitude enhancement with attention was most prominent over occipital-temporal scalp areas of the right cerebral hemisphere regardless of the visual field of stimulation. These findings indicate that the SSVEP reflects an enhancement of neural responses to all stimuli that fall within the "spotlight" of spatial attention, whether or not the stimuli are task-relevant. Recordings of the SSVEP provide a new approach for studying the neural mechanisms and functional properties of selective attention to multi-element visual displays.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/93/10/4770.full.pdf

Selective attention to stimulus location modulates the steady-state visual evoked potential

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by multidimensional auditory stimuli were recorded from the scalp in a selective-attention task. Subjects listened to tone pips varying orthogonally between two levels each of pitch, location, and duration and responded to longer duration target stimuli having specific values of pitch and location. The discriminability of the pitch and location attributes was varied between groups. By examining the ERPs to tones that shared pitch and/or locational cues with the designated target, we inferred interrelationships among the processing of these attributes. In all groups, stimuli that failed to match the target tone in an easily discriminable cue elicited only transitory ERP signs of selective processing. Tones sharing the "easy" but not the "hard" cue with the target elicited ERPs that indicated more extensive processing, but not as extensive as stimuli sharing both cues. In addition, reaction times and ERP latencies to the designated targets were not influenced by variations in the discriminability of pitch and location. This pattern of results is consistent with parallel, self-terminating models and holistic models of processing and contradicts models specifying either serial or exhaustive parallel processing of these dimensions. Both the parallel, self-terminating models and the holistic models provide a generalized mechanism for hierarchical stimulus selections that achieve an economy of processing, an underlying goal of classic, multiple-stage theories of selective attention. Language: en

Selective attention to multidimensional auditory stimuli.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from human subjects in response to short trains of rapidly presented tone pips of two frequencies. Subjects listened selectively to tones of one frequency as directed by a visual cue prior to each train and responded to occasional longer-duration target tones of that frequency. The early negative difference (Nd) between ERPs elicited by the tones when attended versus unattended was minimal for the first stimulus in each train but developed rapidly, attaining stable values by about the third stimulus. The development of this early Nd was most rapid when two attended tones began a train. Long time-base averages revealed the concomitant development of a standing negativity over the course of each train. In contrast, late positive ERPs distinguished attended from unattended target tones even when they occurred in the first position of a train, prior to the development of Nd. The latency of this late positivity together with the reaction time to the targets decreased substantially as the Nd developed. It was concluded that subjects can select stimuli at various stages of analysis, but employment of the early selection mechanism indexed by Nd enables an economy of processing and faster and more accurate task performance. This mode of early selection is not pre-set in advance of a stimulus train, however, at least under the present conditions.

Temporal dynamics of human auditory selective attention.

Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from subjects who attended selectively to a sequence of tones of one frequency and ignored a comparable sequence of tones having a different frequency and spatial origin. In one condition the tones consisted of randomized sequences of brief tone pips while in a second condition the tones were brief increments in intensity (pedestals) of continuous tones at the two frequencies. The tone pips and pedestals were delivered at comparable interstimulus intervals (ISIs), which were short (250–550 ms) in some runs and long (1250–2750 ms) in others. For both classes of stimuli, the subject's task was to detect occasional “target” tones of a slightly shorter duration than the more frequent “standard” tones. Stimuli of the attended frequency elicited a broad negative ERP component (Nd) relative to the unattended tone ERPs. The Nd wave had a considerably shorter onset latency and was smaller in overall amplitude at the faster rate of stimulation. However, the Nd wave did not differ in latency or amplitude between the tone pip and pedestal conditions at corresponding ISIs, suggesting that a high rate of information delivery is a more important factor in accelerating Nd onset than is the continuous reinforcement of the sensory cues that define the two classes of input.

J. C. Hansen

Papers

Endogeneous brain potentials associated with selective auditory attention

Selective attention to stimulus location modulates the steady-state visual evoked potential

Selective attention to multidimensional auditory stimuli.

Temporal dynamics of human auditory selective attention.

Effects of stimulation rate and attribute cuing on event-related potentials during selective auditory attention.