Search results for "EEC"

2016

The flexible access to information in working memory is crucial for adaptive behavior. It is assumed that this is realized by switching the focus of attention within working memory. Switching of attention is mirrored in the P3a component of the human event-related brain potential (ERP) and it has been argued that the processes reflected by the P3a are also relevant for selecting information within working memory. The aim of the present study was to further evaluate whether the P3a mirrors genuine switching of attention within working memory by applying an object switching task: Participants updated a memory list of four digits either by replacing one item with another digit or by processing…

2013

Distraction of goal-oriented performance by a sudden change in the auditory environment is an everyday life experience. Different types of changes can be distracting, including a sudden onset of a transient sound and a slight deviation of otherwise regular auditory background stimulation. With regard to deviance detection, it is assumed that slight changes in a continuous sequence of auditory stimuli are detected by a predictive coding mechanisms and it has been demonstrated that this mechanism is capable of distracting ongoing task performance. In contrast, it is open whether transient detection – which does not rely on predictive coding mechanisms – can trigger behavioral distraction, too…

SINGLE-TRIAL BASED INDEPENDENT COMPONENT ANALYSIS ON MISMATCH NEGATIVITY IN CHILDREN

2010

Independent component analysis (ICA) does not follow the superposition rule. This motivates us to study a negative event-related potential — mismatch negativity (MMN) estimated by the single-trial based ICA (sICA) and averaged trace based ICA (aICA), respectively. To sICA, an optimal digital filter (ODF) was used to remove low-frequency noise. As a result, this study demonstrates that the performance of the sICA+ODF and aICA could be different. Moreover, MMN under sICA+ODF fits better with the theoretical expectation, i.e., larger deviant elicits larger MMN peak amplitude.

Auditory Event-Related Potentials in the Study of Developmental Language-Related Disorders

1997

This article reviews recent auditory event-related potential (ERP) studies of developmental language disorder (DLD) and dyslexia/reading disorder (RD). The possibility of using ERPs in searching for precursors of these disorders in the early development of infants at risk is also discussed. Differences in exogenous/sensory ERPs at the latency range of P1 and N1-P2 components have been reported between groups with DLD and RD and control groups. Latency differences between the groups may be related to a common timing deficit suggested by some researchers to be one of the possible underlying factors both in DLD and dyslexia. N1 amplitude group differences may be partly related to arousal/atten…

Hemostatic Abnormalities in Patients With Severe Preeclampsia

2007

Preeclampsia is the most common medical disorder of pregnancy. Early onset preeclampsia is defined as presentation of hypertension and proteinuria before 34 weeks of gestation. Alterations of endothelial cells and fibrin deposition in microvasculature lead to enhanced activation of the coagulation cascade and impaired fibrinolysis associated with multiple organ dysfunctions. Plasma samples were obtained from 50 patients with severe preeclampsia before 34 weeks of gestation and in 61 patients with late preeclampsia. Factor VIIIR:Ag, fibrinogen, D-dimer, and thrombomodulin increased with advanced pregnancy. The platelet count is very important because of the close correlation with the activa…

Cognitive dysfunction in patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis

2006

Cognitive dysfunction is considered one of the clinical markers of multiple sclerosis (MS). However, in the literature there are inconsistent reports on the prevalence of cognitive dysfunction, and separate data for the relapsing-remitting (RR) type of the disease are not always presented. In this study, we submitted 461 RRMS patients to a battery of neuropsychological tests to investigate their impairment in various cognitive domains. As a consequence of the exclusion criteria, the sample is not fully representative of the entire population of RRMS patients. In this selected sample, when only the eight scores of a core battery (Mental Deterioration Battery) were considered (with respectiv…

Interindividual synchronization of brain activity during live verbal communication

2013

Verbal social interaction plays an important role both in the etiology and treatment of psychiatric disorders. However, the neural basis of social interaction has primarily been studied in the individual brain, neglecting the inter-individual perspective. Here, we show inter-individual neuronal coupling of brain activity during live verbal interaction, by investigating 11 pairs of good female friends who were instructed to speak about autobiographical life events during simultaneous fMRI acquisition. The analysis revealed that the time course of neural activity in areas associated with speech production was coupled with the time course of neural activity in the interlocutor's auditory corte…

Three de novo losses and one insertion within a pericentric inversion of chromosome 6 in a patient with complete absence of expressive speech and red…

2008

A 32-year-old female patient, observed for 30 years because of a distinctive phenotype consisting of a dysmorphic face non-progressive deficit of motor control, lack of speech development, reduced sensitivity to pain, with a known, complex interstitial deletion 6q14 within a de novo pericentric inversion 6p11.2;q15, was re-examined at the molecular level. Applying the Infinium HumanHap300 BeadChip array and BAC-based FISH we found two new non-contiguous microdeletions in addition to the one detected previously by high resolution G-band analysis. A 360 kb loss in band 6p12.3, containing the genes RHAG, CRISP1, 2, and 3, and PGK2, a 1.15 Mb loss in 6p12.2-p12.1, containing the genes PKHD1, IL…

ERP correlates of transposed-letter priming effects: The role of vowels versus consonants

2008

One key issue for any computational model of visual-word recognition is the choice of an input coding scheme for assigning letter position. Recent research has shown that pseudowords created by transposing two letters are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words (e.g., relovution activates REVOLUTION). We report a masked priming lexical decision experiment in which the pseudoword primes were created by transposing/replacing two consonants or two vowels while event-related potentials were recorded. The results showed a modulation of the amplitude at an early window (150-250 ms) and at the N400 component for vowels but not for consonant transpositions. In ad…

Think globally: Cross-linguistic variation in electrophysiological activity during sentence comprehension

2011

This paper demonstrates systematic cross-linguistic differences in the electrophysiological correlates of conflicts between form and meaning (“semantic reversal anomalies”). These engender P600 effects in English and Dutch (e.g. Kolk et al., 2003 ; Kuperberg et al., 2003), but a biphasic N400 – late positivity pattern in German (Schlesewsky and Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2009), and monophasic N400 effects in Turkish (Experiment 1) and Mandarin Chinese (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 revealed that, in Icelandic, semantic reversal anomalies show the English pattern with verbs requiring a position-based identification of argument roles, but the German pattern with verbs requiring a case-based identi…