Recent years have seen an explosion of research on the N2 component of the event‐related potential, a negative wave peaking between 200 and 350 ms after stimulus onset. This research has focused on ...the influence of “cognitive control,” a concept that covers strategic monitoring and control of motor responses. However, rich research traditions focus on attention and novelty or mismatch as determinants of N2 amplitude. We focus on paradigms that elicit N2 components with an anterior scalp distribution, namely, cognitive control, novelty, and sequential matching, and argue that the anterior N2 should be divided into separate control‐ and mismatch‐related subcomponents. We also argue that the oddball N2 belongs in the family of attention‐related N2 components that, in the visual modality, have a posterior scalp distribution. We focus on the visual modality for which components with frontocentral and more posterior scalp distributions can be readily distinguished.
Entanglement in quantum systems is usually degraded by interaction with the environment. From time to time, some parties of a multipartite entangled system may become decoherent with other parties of ...the system due to the interference with the environment. In this situation, it is interesting to know how much information the residual system would keep on carrying. In this paper, as a starting point for any entangled system, we investigate the property of the 2×N×M state with qubit being disentangled, which is characterized by the measurement of robustness.
Previous research has shown that consummatory ERP components are sensitive to contextual valence. The present study investigated the contextual valence effect across anticipatory and consummatory ...phases by requiring participants to play a simple gambling task during a gain context and a loss context. During the anticipatory phase, the cue‐P3 was more positive in the gain context compared to the loss context, whereas the stimulus‐preceding negativity (SPN) was comparable across the two contexts. With respect to the consummatory phase, the feedback‐related negativity (FRN) in response to the zero‐value outcome was more negative in the gain versus loss context, whereas the feedback P3 (fb‐P3) in response to the zero‐value outcome was insensitive to contextual valence. These findings suggest that contextual valence effect occurs at a relative early stage of both the reward anticipation and consumption. Moreover, across the gain and loss contexts, the SPN was selectively correlated with the FRN, whereas the cue‐P3 was selectively associated with the fb‐P3, pointing to a close association between the anticipatory and consummatory phases in reward dynamics.
Two ERP components have been observed following correct and incorrect responses, the error‐related negativity (ERN/Ne) and the correct‐related negativity (CRN). The function of these components is ...still under debate. We used a visual size discrimination task at three difficulty levels and utilized a temporospatial principal component analysis (PCA) to examine whether ERN/Ne and CRN could be explained by one or more factors. While ERN/Ne decreased with higher task difficulty, amplitudes increased for correct responses at parietal electrodes. PCA revealed two temporospatial factors: a centrally distributed factor differing between correct and incorrect responses and a more frontoparietally distributed factor contributing to both ERN/Ne and CRN. These data support the notion that ERN/Ne and CRN might reflect a combination of two underlying processes: an error‐sensitive and an outcome‐independent aspect of response monitoring.
The prevalence of depression increases substantially during adolescence. Several predictors of major depressive disorder have been established, but their predictive power is limited. In the current ...study, the feedback negativity (FN), an event‐related potential component elicited by feedback indicating monetary gain versus loss, was recorded in 68 never‐depressed adolescent girls. Over the following 2 years, 24% of participants developed a major depressive episode (MDE); illness onset was predicted by blunted FN at initial evaluation. Lower FN amplitude predicted more depressive symptoms during the follow‐up period, even after controlling for neuroticism and depressive symptoms at baseline. This is the first prospective study to demonstrate a link between a neural measure of reward sensitivity and the first onset of an MDE. The current results suggest that low reward sensitivity may be an important factor in the development of depression.
Background
Although cognitive theories of depression have postulated enhanced processing of negatively valenced information, previous EEG studies have shown both increased and reduced sensitivity for ...negative performance feedback in MDD. To reconcile these paradoxical findings, it has been speculated that sensitivity for negative feedback is potentiated in moderate MDD, but reduced in highly anhedonic subjects. The goal of this study was to test this hypothesis by analyzing the feedback‐related negativity (FRN), frontomedial theta power (FMT), and source‐localized anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC) activity after negative feedback.
Methods
Fourteen unmedicated participants with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and 15 control participants performed a reinforcement learning task while 128‐channel Electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. FRN, FMT, and LORETA source‐localized aMCC activity after negative and positive feedback were compared between groups.
Results
The MDD group showed higher FRN amplitudes and aMCC activation to negative feedback than controls. Moreover, aMCC activation to negative feedback was inversely related to self‐reported anhedonia. In contrast, self‐reported anxiety correlated with feedback‐evoked frontomedial theta (FMT) within the depression group.
Conclusions
The present findings suggest that, among depressed and anxious individuals, enhanced processing of negative feedback occurs relatively early in the information processing stream. These results extend prior work and indicate that although moderate depression is associated with elevated sensitivity for negative feedback, high levels of anhedonia may attenuate this effect.
Recent event-related potential (ERP) studies in language comprehension converge in finding anticipatory negativities preceding words or word segments that can be pre-activated based on either ...sentence contexts or phonological cues. We review these findings from different paradigms in the light of evidence from other cognitive domains in which slow negative potentials have long been associated with anticipatory processes and discuss their potential underlying mechanisms. We propose that this family of anticipatory negativities captures common mechanisms associated with the pre-activation of linguistic information both within words and within sentences. Future studies could utilize these anticipatory negativities in combination with other, well-established ERPs, to simultaneously track prediction-related processes emerging at different time intervals (before and after the perception of pre-activated input) and with distinct time courses (shorter-lived and longer-lived cognitive operations).
•While comprehending language, readers and listeners can predict different aspects of upcoming words.•Previous ERP studies have found that strongly expected words and word segments are preceded by sustained negativities.•These anticipatory negativities are observed for predictions derived both from sentence contexts and discrete phonological cues.•We review these studies and discuss potential shared mechanisms across anticipatory negativities in language comprehension under a predictive account.
•Significant differences arise between correct and erroneous feedback conditions.•Periodic error signal enforces periodic cortical response.•Cortical response appears robust to stimulus types and ...error modality.•ERN and Pe coincide with minima and maxima of the error signal, respectively.•Brain regions engage in a consistent order phase-locked to the error signal.
Performance monitoring and feedback processing – especially in the wake of erroneous outcomes – represent a crucial aspect of everyday life, allowing us to deal with imminent threats in the short term but also promoting necessary behavioral adjustments in the long term to avoid future conflicts. Over the last thirty years, research extensively analyzed the neural correlates of processing discrete error stimuli, unveiling the error-related negativity (ERN) and error positivity (Pe) as two main components of the cognitive response. However, the connection between the ERN/Pe and distinct stages of error processing, ranging from action monitoring to subsequent corrective behavior, remains ambiguous. Furthermore, mundane actions such as steering a vehicle already transgress the scope of discrete erroneous events and demand fine-tuned feedback control, and thus, the processing of continuous error signals – a topic scarcely researched at present. We analyzed two electroencephalography datasets to investigate the processing of continuous erroneous signals during a target tracking task, employing feedback in various levels and modalities. We observed significant differences between correct (slightly delayed) and erroneous feedback conditions in the larger one of the two datasets that we analyzed, both in sensor and source space. Furthermore, we found strong error-induced modulations that appeared consistent across datasets and error conditions, indicating a clear order of engagement of specific brain regions that correspond to individual components of error processing.
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The error‐related negativity (ERN) is thought to index an anterior cingulate (ACC) behavioral monitoring system. The feedback ERN (FRN) is elicited to error feedback when the correct response is not ...known, but also when a choice outcome is suboptimal and to passive reward prediction violation, suggesting that the monitoring system may not be restricted to actions. This study used principal components analysis to show that the ERN consists of a single central component whereas the reward prediction violation FRN is comprised of central and prefrontal components. A prefrontal component is also present in action monitoring but occurs later, at the error positivity latency. This suggests that ACC monitors both actions and events for reward prediction error. Prefrontal cortex may update reward expectation based on the prediction violation with the latency difference due to differential processing time for motor and perceptual information.
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