History of concussion impacts electrophysiological correlates of working memory

Abstract

Sports-related concussions occur in approximately 21% of college athletes with implications for long-term cognitive impairments in working memory. Working memory involves the capacity to maintain short-term information and integrate with higher-order cognitive processing for planning and behavior execution, critical skills for optimal cognitive and athletic performance. This study quantified working memory impairments in 36 American football college athletes (18-23years old) using event-related potentials (ERPs). Despite performing similarly in a standard 2-back working memory task, athletes with history of concussion exhibited larger P1 and P3 amplitudes compared to Controls. Concussion History group latencies were slower for the P1 and faster for the N2. Source estimation analyses indicated that previously concussed athletes engaged different brain regions compared to athletes with no concussion history. These findings suggest that ERPs may be a sensitive and objective measure to detect long-term cognitive consequences of concussion.

The Impact of Sports-Related Concussions on the Language System

“…The SRC-ERP literature has primarily examined changes in two cognitive-evoked ERP components, the N200 and P300 (see Brush and colleagues [40] for review). This research indicates that the amplitude and latency of the P300, reflecting context-updating and resource allocation [41,42], are altered following SRC during selective attention [43][44][45] and working memory [46,47]. The effects of SRC on the N200, indexing mismatch/novelty detection, cognitive control, and/or response monitoring depending on task demands [48], are less clear than the P300.…”

“…The effects of SRC on the N200, indexing mismatch/novelty detection, cognitive control, and/or response monitoring depending on task demands [48], are less clear than the P300. Some report altered N200 amplitudes [43,44,49] and latencies [49,50] associated with a history of concussion, whereas others failed to find differences in amplitude [46,50] or latency [43]. Importantly, these altered ERP correlates often occur despite normative performance on behavioral neuropsychological assessments [43,44,46].…”

“…ERP findings indicate that sports-related concussions are associated with long-term changes in cognitive brain function [44,46,51]. However, there remains a lack of understanding on how SRC may influence neural mechanisms of language processing.…”

Spatial working memory performance following acute sport-related concussion

“…Indeed, several studies have shown evidence of altered neurophysiological function during working memory tasks, measured through functional magnetic resonance imaging, event-related potentials, or eventrelated spectral perturbations, in the absence of impaired task performance following concussion. [60][61][62][63][64] As well, one study has found impaired auditory discrimination when combined with a spatial span task, but not when performed alone. 65 Despite our finding that few athletes showed impairments in spatial span performance acutely following concussion, some prior work has shown that this task might be a good test of malingering.…”

Dynamic effects of habituation and novelty detection on newborn event-related potentials

“…Our approach combines the classic use of temporal principal components analysis (tPCA) to identify temporal windows of interest within the ERP (Hudac, Cortesa, Ledwidge, & Molfese, 2018;Molfese, Nunez, Seibert, & Ramanaiah, 1976) with modern multilevel modeling techniques to characterize patterns of change across the experiment, similar to work conducted in special pediatric populations (e. g. . Analyses for Experiments 1 and 2 followed similar procedures.…”