Search results for "Contingent Negative Variation"

The effects of 8-weeks Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program on cognitive control: an EEG study

2019

Objectives: Mindfulness practice can enhance different aspects of attentional functions, such as the ability to sustain the attentional focus over time. However, it is still unclear whether this practice might indeed impact higher cognitive functions, such as control mechanisms that allow the appropriate and flexible allocation of attentional resources. In this longitudinal study, changes associated with a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program were investigated, with a focus on proactive and reactive cognitive control mechanisms, namely, the ability to maintain task-relevant information and to prepare in advance the response, and the ability to promptly adjust overlearned behavi…

Spatiotemporal Neurodynamics Underlying Internally and Externally Driven Temporal Prediction: A High Spatial Resolution ERP Study

2015

Abstract Temporal prediction (TP) is a flexible and dynamic cognitive ability. Depending on the internal or external nature of information exploited to generate TP, distinct cognitive and brain mechanisms are engaged with the same final goal of reducing uncertainty about the future. In this study, we investigated the specific brain mechanisms involved in internally and externally driven TP. To this end, we employed an experimental paradigm purposely designed to elicit and compare externally and internally driven TP and a combined approach based on the application of a distributed source reconstruction modeling on a high spatial resolution electrophysiological data array. Specific spatiotemp…

The sound of music: differentiating musicians using a fast, musical multi-feature mismatch negativity paradigm.

2011

Abstract Musicians’ skills in auditory processing depend highly on instrument, performance practice, and on level of expertise. Yet, it is not known though whether the style/genre of music might shape auditory processing in the brains of musicians. Here, we aimed at tackling the role of musical style/genre on modulating neural and behavioral responses to changes in musical features. Using a novel, fast and musical sounding multi-feature paradigm, we measured the mismatch negativity (MMN), a pre-attentive brain response, to six types of musical feature change in musicians playing three distinct styles of music (classical, jazz, rock/pop) and in non-musicians. Jazz and classical musicians sco…

(De-)Accentuation and the Processing of Information Status: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials

2012

The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions controlled the information status (given vs. new) of referring and non-referring target expressions (nouns vs. adjectives) and were elicited via context sentences, which did not – unlike most previous ERP studies in the field – trigger an explicit focus expectation. Target utterances displayed prosodic realizations of the critical words which differed in accent position and accent type. Electrophysiological results showed an effect of information status, maxi…

Event-related potential (ERP) responses to violations of inflectional and derivational rules of Finnish

2007

Event-related potentials (ERP) were used to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of inflectional and derivational morphology. The participants were presented with visual sentences containing critical words in which either inflectional, derivational or both rules (combined violation) of Finnish were violated. Inflectional anomalies violated a number agreement of a noun with a previous auxiliary word. Derivational violations included a word-internal selectional restriction violation, i.e., a root and suffix category violation. Combined violations contained both a number and a category violation. The phonemic length of the critical words was controlled. Inflectional violations elici…

Primary motor area contribution to attentional reorienting after distraction

2008

The anatomical structures involved in distraction-related processing in the auditory domain were investigated using magnetoencephalography. Participants performed a duration-discrimination task on a sequence of 200 and 400 ms long tones. Infrequent (12%) task-irrelevant pitch changes resulted in slower discriminative responses and more errors. Event-related potentials to these changes show an increased N1, a mismatch negativity, a P3a, and a reorienting negativity. The event-related magnetic fields revealed focal activities in superior and medial temporal areas in the N1/mismatch negativity time range. No significant activity was found in the P3a interval. In the reorienting negativity inte…

Examining task-dependencies of different attentional processes as reflected in the P3a and reorienting negativity components of the human event-relat…

2005

Abstract Unexpected changes in task-irrelevant auditory stimuli are capable to distract processing of task-relevant visual information. This effect is accompanied by the elicitation of event-related potential (ERP) components associated with attentional orientation, i.e. P3a and reorienting negativity (RON). In the present study we varied the demands of a visual task in order to test whether the RON component – as an index of attentional reorientation after distraction – is confined to a semantic task requiring working memory. In two ERP experiments we applied an auditory-visual distraction paradigm in which subjects were instructed to discriminate visual stimuli preceded by a task-irreleva…

Anxiety, Stress, and Contingent Negative Variation Reconsidered

1984

Stroop task performance across the lifespan: High cognitive reserve in older age is associated with enhanced proactive and reactive interference cont…

2020

Abstract Susceptibility to interference increases with age but there is large inter-individual variability in interference control in older adults due to a number of biological and environmental factors. The present study aims at analyzing behavior and ERPs in a Stroop interference task with increasing difficulty in a sample of 246 young, middle-aged and healthy old participants. The old age group was divided into three subgroups based on performance scores. The results show a gradual performance reduction with increasing age and task difficulty. However, old high performers reached a performance level comparable to middle-aged subjects. The contingent negative variation (CNV) reflecting pr…

The time course of temporal discrimination: An ERP study

2009

Objective: The question of how temporal information is processed by the brain is still a matter of debate. This study aimed to elucidate the brain electrical activity associated with a visual temporal discrimination task. Methods: For this purpose, 44 participants were required to compare pairs of sequentially presented time intervals: a fixed standard interval (1000 ms), and an equal-to-standard, longer (1200 ms) or shorter (800 ms) comparison interval. Behavioural data and event-related potentials (ERPs) were analyzed. Results: Long intervals were more rapidly identified than short intervals. The amplitude of the contingent negative variation (CNV) found at frontocentral sites before the …