No effect of target probability on P3b amplitudes

Go/No-Go Ratios Modulate Inhibition-Related Brain Activity: An Event-Related Potential Study

(1) Background: Response inhibition refers to the conscious ability to suppress behavioral responses, which is crucial for effective cognitive control. Currently, research on response inhibition remains controversial, and the neurobiological mechanisms associated with response inhibition are still being explored. The Go/No-Go task is a widely used paradigm that can be used to effectively assess response inhibition capability. While many studies have utilized equal numbers of Go and No-Go trials, how different ratios affect response inhibition remains unknown; (2) Methods: This study investigated the impact of different ratios of Go and No-Go conditions on response inhibition using the Go/No-Go task combined with event-related potential (ERP) techniques; (3) Results: The results showed that as the proportion of Go trials decreased, behavioral performance in Go trials significantly improved in terms of response time, while error rates in No-Go trials gradually decreased. Additionally, the NoGo-P3 component at the central average electrodes (Cz, C1, C2, FCz, FC1, FC2, PCz, PC1, and PC2) exhibited reduced amplitude and latency; (4) Conclusions: These findings indicate that different ratios in Go/No-Go tasks influence response inhibition, with the brain adjusting processing capabilities and rates for response inhibition. This effect may be related to the brain's predictive mechanism model.

Mental chronometry in big noisy data

Temporal measures (latencies) in the event-related potentials of the EEG (ERPs) are a valuable tool for estimating the timing of mental processes, one which takes full advantage of the high temporal resolution of the EEG. Especially in larger scale studies using a multitude of individual EEG-based tasks, the quality of latency measures often suffers from high and low frequency noise residuals due to the resulting low trial counts (because of compressed tasks) and because of the limited feasibility of visual inspection of the large-scale data. In the present study, we systematically evaluated two different approaches to latency estimation (peak latencies and fractional area latencies) with respect to their data quality and the application of noise reduction by jackknifing methods. Additionally, we tested the recently introduced method of Standardized Measurement Error (SME) to prune the dataset. We demonstrate that fractional area latency in pruned and jackknifed data may amplify within-subjects effect sizes dramatically in the analyzed data set. Between-subjects effects were less affected by the applied procedures, but remained stable regardless of procedure.

Decoding of cognitive processes involved in the continuous performance task

Decoding of electroencephalogram brain representations is a powerful data driven technique to assess the stream of cognitive information processing. It could promote a more thorough understanding of cognitive control networks. For many years, the continuous performance task has been utilized to investigate impaired proactive and reactive cognitive functions. So far, mainly task performance and univariate electroencephalogram were involved in such investigations. In this study, we benefit from multi-variate pattern analysis of continuous performance task variations to provide a more complete spatio-temporal outline of information processing flow involved in sustained and transient attention and response preparation. Besides effects that are well in line with previous EEG research but could be described in more spatial and temporal detail by the used methods, our results could suggest the presence of a higher order feedback control system when expectations are violated. Such a feedback control is related to modulations of behavior both intra- and inter-individually.