Brain responses related to semantic meaning

Event related potentials to emotional adjectives during reading

“…Effects in the P1/N1 time range in previous studies may thus have arisen as artifacts if experimental stimuli were not controlled for other confounding physical and linguistic dimensions. Alternatively, the extant literature suggests that ERP differentiation between emotional, particularly unpleasant, and neutral words in the P1/N1 time range is more likely to occur in studies using very brief stimulus presentation, near or even below the perceptual threshold (Begleiter & Platz, 1969; Bernat et al, 2001: Chapman et al, 1978; Chapman, McCrary, Chapman, & Martin, 1980; Kostandov & Arzumanov, 1977; Ortigue et al, 2004), when disorder‐relevant words are presented to patients populations (Flor, Knost, & Birbaumer, 1997; Knost, Flor, Braun, & Birbaumer, 1997; Pauli, Amrhein, Muhlberger, Dengler, & Wiedemann, 2005), or sometimes both (Knost et al, 1997; Pauli et al, 2005). A possible mechanism for effects occurring in the P1/N1 range is a subcortical feed‐forward mechanism, as extensively described by LeDoux and colleagues (for reviews, see LeDoux, 2000, 2003), which appears to be responsible both for the acquisition of conditioned responses and the detection of emotional stimuli when perceptual resources are severely limited, like in subliminal or near‐threshold presentation.…”

Memory timeline: Brain ERP C250 (not P300) is an early biomarker of short-term storage

“…When manipulated by a cognitive task with separable task conditions, ERPs and their underlying components can provide direct, quantitative indices of abstract cognitive processes. ERP components can reflect brain activity both in time (high resolution on the order of milliseconds) and in space (electrode location), and their behavior under task conditions has been correlated with memory (Begleiter et al, 1993; Chapman et al, 1978a; Chapman et al, 1981; Friedman et al, 1978; Polich, 2007; Ruchkin et al, 1990; Rugg and Curran, 2007), recognition and familiarity (Morgan et al, 2008; Pfütze et al, 2002; Trenner et al, 2004), semantic meaning (Chapman et al, 1978b), stimulus expectancy (Arbel et al, 2010; Walter et al, 1964), executive functioning (Begleiter and Porjesz, 1975), and stimulus relevance (Chapman and Bragdon, 1964; Chapman, 1965; Chapman et al, 2013), among others. While anatomical imaging methods, such as PET and MRI, may indicate where activity occurs during memory storage and processing, their poor temporal resolution (on the order of seconds) makes it difficult to separate the early post-stimulus sequence of events (Missonnier et al, 2004), including sensory processing, memory storage, and later executive functions such as solving the task.…”

ERP C250 shows the elderly (cognitively normal, Alzheimer’s disease) store more stimuli in short-term memory than Young Adults do

“…Previous work with this paradigm and our experience with the ERP components it extracts led us to retaining this set. The components extracted included well-known components that we have derived and studied before with the Number-Letter paradigm, such as P300 (Chapman and Bragdon, 1964; Chapman, 1965; Chapman, McCrary and Chapman, 1978; Polich, 2004; 2007), CNV (Walter et al, 1964), C145 (Chapman et al, 2013a), C250 (called the storage component in Chapman et al (1978; 1981)), and other short- and long-latency components (for graphs of these components, see Supplementary Figure S2). One component represented an ocular-related artifact (with a maximum at 15 ms post-stimulus and no activity around 250 ms post-stimulus) (Yuval-Greenberg et al, 2008) so it is not discussed further.…”

“…When manipulated by a cognitive task with separable task conditions, ERPs and their underlying components can provide direct, quantitative brain indices of abstract cognitive processes. The behavior of ERP components under varied task conditions has been related to memory processes (Chapman, McCrary and Chapman, 1978; Friedman, Vaughan and Erlenmeyer-Kimling, 1978; Chapman, McCrary and Chapman, 1981; Ruchkin et al, 1990; Begleiter, Porjesz and Wang, 1993; Polich, 2007; Rugg and Curran, 2007; Fukuda, Awh and Vogel, 2010), recognition and familiarity (Pfütze, Sommer and Schweinberger, 2002; Trenner et al, 2004; Morgan et al, 2008), semantic meaning (Chapman et al, 1978), stimulus expectancy (Walter et al, 1964; Arbel et al, 2011), executive functioning (Begleiter and Porjesz, 1975), and stimulus relevance (Chapman and Bragdon, 1964; Chapman, 1965; Chapman et al, 2013a), among others. ERP components have also proven useful in measuring age-related versus dementia-related changes in cognition and memory (Chapman et al, 2007; Missonnier et al, 2007; Rossini et al, 2007; Jackson and Snyder, 2008; Olichney et al, 2008; Chapman et al, 2011; Cespón, Galdo-Álvarez and Díaz, 2013; Friedman, 2013).…”