Abstract
A visual three-stimulus (target, nontarget, standard) paradigm was employed in which subjects responded only to the target. Nontarget stimulus properties were varied systematically to evaluate how stimulus typicality (non-novel vs. novel) across task discrimination (easy vs. difficult) conditions affects P3a scalp topography. Nontarget stimuli consisted of letters, small squares, large squares, and novel patterns; discrimination difficulty between the target and standard was varied across conditions. When the discrimination was easy, P300 amplitude was larger for the target than the nontarget with parietal maximums for both. In contrast, when the discrimination was difficult, nontarget amplitude (P3a) was larger and earlier than the target P300 over the frontal/central electrode sites, whereas target amplitude (P3b) was larger parietally and occurred later. P3a was largest when elicited by either the large square or novel pattern stimuli. The findings suggest that stimulus context as defined by the target/standard discrimination difficulty rather than stimulus novelty determines P3a generation.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alho, K., Escera, C. and Schröger, E. Event-related brain potential indices of involuntary attention to auditory stimulus changes. In: J. Polich (Ed.), Detection of Change: Event-Related Potential and fMRI Findings. Kluwer Academic Press, Boston, 2003: 23–40.
Barcelo, F., Suwazono, S. and Knight, R.T. Prefrontal modulation of visual processing in humans. Nature Neurosci., 2000, 3: 399–403.
Comerchero, M.D. and Polich J. P3a, perceptual distinctiveness, and stimulus modality. Cog. Brain Res., 1998, 7: 41–48.
Comerchero, M.D. and Polich J. P3a and P3b from typical auditory and visual stimuli.Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1999, 10: 24–30.
Courchesne, E. Changes in P3 waves with event repetition: long-term effects on scalp distribution and amplitude. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1978, 45: 754–766.
Courchesne, E., Courchesne, R.Y. and Hillyard, S.A. The effect of stimulus deviation on P3 waves to easily recognized stimuli. Neuropsychologia, 1978, 16: 189–199.
Courchesne, E., Hillyard, S.A. and Galambos, R. Stimulus novelty, task relevance and the visual evoked potential in man. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1975, 39: 131–143.
Courchesne, E., Kilman, B.A., Galambos, R. and Lincoln, A. Autism: processing of novel auditory information assessed by event-related brain potentials. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1984, 59: 238–248.
Demiralp, T., Ademoglu, A., Comerchero, M. and Polich, J. Wavelet analysis of P3a and P3b. Brain Top., 2001, 13: 251–267.
Eimer, M. Effects of attention and stimulus probability on ERPs in a go/nogo task. Biol. Psychol., 1993, 35: 123–138.
Escera, C., Alho, K., Winkler, I. and Naatanen, R. Neural mechanisms of involuntary attention to acoustic novelty and change. J. Cog. Neurosci., 1998, 10: 590–604.
Fabiani, M., and Friedman, D. Changes in brain activity patterns in aging: The novelty oddball. Psychophysiology, 1995, 32: 579–594.
Fabiani, M., Friedman, D. and Cheng, J. Individual differences in P3 scalp distribution in older adults, and their relationship to frontal lobe function. Psychophysiology, 1998, 35: 698–708.
Falkenstein, M., Hohnsbein, J. and Hoormann, J. Effects of choice complexity on different subcomponents of the late positive complex of the event-related potential. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1994, 92: 148–160.
Falkenstein, M., Koshlykova, N.A., Kiroj, V.N., Hoormann, J. and Hohnsbein, J. Late ERP components in visual and auditory go/nogo tasks. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1995, 96: 36–43.
Ford, J.M., Sullivan, E.V., Marsh, L., White, P.M., Lim, K.O. and Pfefferbaum, A. The relationship between P300 amplitude and regional gray matter volumes depends upon the attentional system engaged. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1994, 90: 214–228.
Friedman, D. and Simpson, G.V. ERP amplitude and scalp distribution to target and novel events: effects of temporal order in young, middle-aged and older adults. Cog. Brain Res., 1994: 49–63.
Friedman, D., Kazmerski, V.A. and Cycowicz, Y.M. Effects of aging on the novelty P3 during attend and ignore oddball tasks. Psychophysiology, 1998, 35: 508–520.
Friedman, D., Simpson, G. and Hamberger, M. Age-related changes in scalp topography to novel and target stimuli. Psychophysiology, 1993, 30: 383–396.
Grillon, C., Courchesne, E., Ameli, R., Elmasian, R. and Braff, D. Effects of rare non-target stimuli on brain electrophysiological activity and performance. Int. J. Psychophysiol., 1990, 9: 257–267.
Halgren, E., Baudena, P., Clarke, J., Heit, G., Liégeois, Chauvel, P. and Musolino, A. Intracerebral potentials to rare target and distractor auditory and visual stimuli. I. Superior temporal plane and parietal lobe. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1995a, 94: 191–220.
Halgren, E., Baudena, P., Clarke, J., Heit, G., Marinkovic, K., Devaux, B., Vignal, J-P. and Biraben, A. Intracerebral potentials to rare target and distractor auditory and visual stimuli. II. Medial, lateral and posterior temporal lobe. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1995b, 94: 229–250.
Halgren, E., Marinkovic, K. and Chauvel, P. Generators of the late cognitive potentials in auditory and visual oddball tasks. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1998, 106: 156–164.
Hartikainen, K. and Knight, R.T. Lateral and orbital prefrontal cortex contributions to attention. In: J. Polich (Ed.), Detection of Change: Event-Related Potential and fMRI Findings. Kluwer Academic Press, Boston, 2003: 99–116.
Jeon, Y.W. and Polich, J. P3a from a passive visual paradigm. Clin. Neurophysiol., 2001, 112: 2202–2208.
Johnson, R. The amplitude of the P300 component of the event-related potentials: Review and synthesis. In: P. Ackles, J.R. Jennings, and M.G.H. Coles (Eds.), Advances in Psychophysiology:AResearch Annual, Vol. 3. JAI Press, Inc., Greenwich, CT, 1988: 69–137.
Johnson, R. On the neural generators of the P300 component of the event-related potential. Psychophysiology, 1993, 30: 90–97.
Katayama, J. and Polich, J. P300 from one-, two-, and three-stimulus auditory paradigms. Int. J. Psychophysiol., 1996a, 23: 33–40.
Katayama, J. and Polich, J. P300, probability, and the three-tone paradigm. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1996b, 100: 555–562.
Katayama, J. and Polich, J. Stimulus context determines P3a and P3b. Psychophysiology, 1998, 35: 23–33.
Katayama, J. and Polich, J. Auditory and visual P300 topography from a three-stimulus paradigm. Clin. Neurophysiol., 1999, 110: 463–468.
Kirino, E., Belger, A., Goldman-Rakic, P. and McCarthy, G. Prefrontal activation evoked by infrequent target and novel stimuli in a visual target detection task: An event-related functional magnetic resonance study. J. Neurosci., 2000, 20: 6612–6618.
Knight, R.T. Decreased response to novel stimuli after prefrontal lesions in man. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1984, 59: 9–20.
Knight, R.T. Aging decreases auditory event-related potentials to unexpected stimuli in humans. Neurobiology of Aging, 1987, 8: 109–113.
Knight, R.T. Neural mechanisms of event-related potentials from human lesion studies. In: J. Rohrbaugh, R. Parasuraman and R. Johnson (Eds.), Event-related Brain Potentials: Basic Issues and Applications. Oxford University Press, New York, 1990: 3–18.
Knight, R.T. Contribution of human hippocampal region to novelty detection. Nature, 1996, 383: 256–259.
Knight, R.T. Distributed cortical network for visual attention. J. Cog. Neurosci., 1997, 9: 75–91.
Knight, R.T., Scabini, D., Woods, D. and Clayworth, C. Contributions of temporal-parietal junction to the human auditory P300. Brain Res., 1989, 502: 109–116.
Kok, A. Event-related potential (ERP) reflections of mental resources: A review and synthesis. Biol. Psychol., 1997, 45: 19–56.
McCarthy, G. and Wood, C.C. Scalp distributions of event-related potentials:Anambiguity associated with analysis of variance models. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1985, 62: 203–208.
McCarthy, G., Luby, M., Gore, J. and Goldman-Rakic, P. Infrequent events transiently activate human prefrontal and parietal cortex as measured by functional MRI. J. Neurophysiol., 1997, 77: 1630–1634.
Mecklinger, A., Maess, B., Opitz, B., Pfeifer, E., Cheyne, D. and Weinberg, H. A MEG analysis of the P300 in visual discrimination tasks. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1998, 108: 45–56.
Opitz, B. ERP and fMRI correlates of target and novelty processing. In: J. Polich (Ed.), Detection of Change: Event-Related Potential and fMRI Findings. Kluwer Academic Press, Boston, 2003: 117–132.
Opitz, B., Mecklinger, A., Von Cramon, D.Y. and Kruggel, F. Combining electrophysiological and hemodynamic measures of the auditory oddball. Psychophysiology, 1999, 36: 142–147.
Pardo, J.V., Fox, P. and Raichle, M. Localization of a human system for sustained attention by positron emission tomography. Nature, 1991, 349: 61–64.
Pfefferbaum, A. and Ford, J.M. ERPs to stimuli requiring response production and inhibition: effects of age, probability and visual noise. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1988, 71: 55–63.
Pfefferbaum, A., Ford, J.M., Roth, W.T. and Kopell, B.S. Age-related changes in auditory event-related potentials. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1980, 49: 266–276.
Pfefferbaum, A., Ford, J.M., Weller, B.J. and Kopell, B.S. ERPs to response production and inhibition. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1985, 60: 423–434.
Polich, J. Normal variation of P300 from auditory stimuli. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1986, 65: 236–240.
Polich, J. Neuropsychology of P3a and P3b: A theoretical overview. In: K. Arikan and N. Moore (Eds.), Advances in Electrophysiology in Clinical Practice and Research., Kjellberg: Wheaton, IL, 2003a, in press.
Polich, J. Overview of P3a and P3b. In: J. Polich (Ed.), Detection of Change: Event-Related Potential and fMRI Findings. Kluwer Academic Press, Boston, 2003b: 83–98.
Polich, J., Alexander, J.E., Bauer, L.O., Kuperman, S., Rohrbaugh, J., Mozarati, S., O'Connor, S.J., Porjesz, B. and Begleiter, H. P300 topography of amplitude/latency correlations. Brain Top., 1997, 9: 275–282.
Polich, J. and Hoffman, L.D. P300 and handedness: Possible corpus callosal contributions to ERPs. Psychophysiology, 1998, 35: 497–507.
Polich, J. and Conroy, M. P3a from visual stimuli: Normative variability and gender effects. In: I. Reinvang and H. Hermann (Eds.), fMRI and ERP findings of individual differences., Hanse Institute: Breman, Germany, 2003, in press.
Polich, J. and Squire, L.R. P300 from amnesic patients with bilateral hippocampal lesions. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1993, 86: 408–417.
Posner, M.I. Attention as a cognitive and neural system. Cur. Dir. Psychol. Sci., 1992, 1: 11–14.
Posner, M.I. and Petersen, S.E. The attention system of the human brain. Ann. Rev. Neurosci., 1990, 13: 25–42.
Potts, G.F., Liotti, M., Tucker, D.M. and Posner, M.I. Frontal and inferior temporal cortical activity in visual target detection: Evidence from high spatially sampled event-related potentials. Brain Top., 1996, 9: 3–14.
Semlitsch, H.V., Anderer, P., Schuster, P. and Presslich, O. A solution for reliable and valid reduction of ocular artifacts, applied to the P300 ERP. Psychophysiology, 1986, 23: 695–703.
Simons, R.F., Graham, F.K., Miles, M.A. and Chen, X. On the relationship of P3a and the novelty-P3. Biol. Psychol., 2001, 56: 207–218.
Spencer, K.M., Dien, J. and Donchin, E. A componential analysis of the ERP elicited by novel events using a dense electrode array. Psychophysiology, 1999, 36: 409–414.
Squires, N.K., Squires, K.C. and Hillyard, S.A. Two varieties of long-latency positive waves evoked by unpredictable auditory stimuli in man. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1975, 38: 387–401.
Suwazono, S., Machado, L. and Knight, R.T. Predictive value of novel stimuli modifies visual event-related potentials and behavior. Clin. Neurophysiol., 2000, 111: 20–39.
Verbaten, M.N., Huyben, M.A. and Kemner, C. Processing capacity and the frontal P3. Int. J. Psychophysiol., 1997, 25: 237–248.
Verleger, R. On the utility of P3 latency as an index of mental chronometry. Psychophysiology, 1997, 34: 131–156.
Yamaguchi, S. and Knight, R.T. P300 generation by novel somatosensory stimuli. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1991a, 78: 50–55.
Yamaguchi, S. and Knight, R. Age effects on the P300 to novel somatosensory stimuli. Electroenceph. clin. Neurophysiol., 1991b, 78: 297–301.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Polich, J., Comerchero, M.D. P3a from Visual Stimuli: Typicality, Task, and Topography. Brain Topogr 15, 141–152 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022637732495
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022637732495