When subjects identified a target among distractors in a rapid serial visual presentation task, the detection of a subsequent target is impaired (attentional blink). By measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated if the processing of an unidentified prime word elicits the N400 semantic priming effect.

Subjects (N = 12) had to identify three target words among distractors in a rapid serial visual presentation task. We varied the association strength between a prime (second target) and a probe (third target). The detection of the prime was impaired. Missed primes did not elicit a P300, indicating that they were not explicitly recognized. Despite this difference between recognized and missed primes, the N400 effect was present in both cases. This result suggests that automatic spread of activation (ASA) can be evoked by missed primes within the attentional blink. It furthermore demonstrates that ASA is sufficient to evoke the N400 effect.

The visual brain quickly sorted stimuli for emotional impact despite high-speed presentation (3 or 5 per s) in a sustained, serial torrent of 700 complex pictures. Event-related potentials, recorded with a dense electrode array, showed selective discrimination of emotionally arousing stimuli from less affective content. Primary sources of this activation were over the occipital cortices, extending to right parietal cortex, suggesting a processing focus in the posterior visual system. Emotion discrimination was independent of formal pictorial properties (color, brightness, spatial frequency, and complexity). The data support the hypothesis of a very short-term conceptual memory store (M. C. Potter, 1999)—shown here to include a fleeting but reliable assessment of affective meaning.

There are few studies on the development of oculomotor functions during childhood. B. Fischer, M. Biscaldi, and S. Gezeck (1997) reported improvement of antisaccade task performance between ages 6 and 16 years. The present study is a replication and extension of those results. In three age groups (6–7, 10–11, 18–26 years), saccades during pro- and antisaccade tasks with 200-ms gap and overlap and during a fixation task were measured. Adults exhibited faster saccades and less prosaccades during the antisaccade tasks than 10–11-year-old children; these two groups had faster saccades during all tasks and less prosaccades during the anti- and the fixation task than 6–7-year-old subjects. Both children groups made more express saccades than adults. Results suggest different degrees of age-related improvement for different saccadic parameters, the effects being greatest for prosaccade inhibition during the antisaccade task and in line with the assumed protracted development of prefrontal functions.

Blood pressure, heart rate, and changes in facial and finger blood flow were monitored in 24 male Chinese and 24 male Caucasians while they described anger-provoking incidents and read out neutral material, either loudly and rapidly or softly and slowly. Describing the incidents loudly and rapidly heightened anger ratings and enhanced digital vasoconstriction but not blood pressure or heart rate; however, anger enhanced blood pressure during soft, slow speech. Facial blood flow increased during anger expression, irrespective of speech style, but decreased when neutral material was read out. The findings suggest that an increase in facial blood flow reduces peripheral vascular resistance during anger expression, and that baroreflexes attenuate increases in heart rate and blood pressure. Racial background did not influence subjective reports or physiological responses, possibly because the procedure did not draw strongly enough on cultural taboos.

The objective of this study was to assess the relation between the intensity of single moods and of mood combinations on blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR). The subjects were 203 healthy registered nurses, all women, who were studied on two work and two off days. Ambulatory BP and HR were recorded every 20 min. On each occasion subjects rated their moods on a 5-point scale. Graded increases in BP and HR were shown with higher ratings of negative moods and decreases for a mood related to energy level. Little change was observed for a positive mood. These effects depended on concurrent changes in other moods. A positive mood countered the effects of a negative mood, whereas two negative moods resulted in unique patterns of BP and HR. The energy level mood moderated the cardiovascular effects of positive and negative moods. Ambulatory methods provide a way of probing into the nature and consequences of everyday emotional experiences.

The deception literature has predominantly focused on detection of guilty individuals using electrodermal measures. Little research has examined other psychophysiological measures or the mechanisms underlying deception. Therefore, the present study examined pupillary responses in a differentiation-of-deception paradigm. Twenty-four undergraduate participants answered the same questions twice, once truthfully and once deceptively, while pupillary responses were recorded. Questions were based on recently learned (episodic) information from scenarios or on general (semantic) knowledge from long-term memory. Task-evoked pupil dilation was significantly greater when participants confabulated responses than when they told the truth for both episodic and semantic memory questions. Previous research has demonstrated that pupil size increases with increased cognitive processing load. The present study suggested that generating deceptive recall was associated with increased pupil size and required greater cognitive processing than truthful recall.

This study investigated EEG differences between children with two subtypes of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and normal control subjects. EEG was recorded during an eyes-closed resting condition and Fourier transformed to provide absolute and relative power estimates for the delta, theta, alpha, and beta bands, and the mean frequency for each band was calculated. Ratio coefficients were also calculated between frequency bands. Mean group differences were found in the theta, alpha, and beta bands between all three groups. Similarly, differences were found between all three groups for the theta/alpha and theta/beta ratios and for the mean frequency of the total EEG. These results support a model of ADHD resulting from a developmental deviation rather than a maturational lag in the central nervous system. Differences between the clinical groups in frontal activity suggest that different neuroanatomical systems are involved in the different subtypes of ADHD.

Many studies have shown a consistent pattern in adults' responses to affective pictures and there is growing evidence of gender differences, as well. Little is known, though, about children's verbal, behavioral, and physiological responses to affective pictures. Two experiments investigated children's responses to pictures. In Experiment 1, children, adolescents, and adults viewed pictures varying in affective content and rated them for pleasure, arousal, and dominance. Results indicated that children and adolescents rated the pictures similarly to adults. In Experiment 2, physiological responses, self-report, and viewing time were measured while children viewed affective pictures. As with adults, children's responses reflected the affective content of the pictures. Gender differences in affective evaluations, corrugator activity, skin conductance, startle modulation, and viewing time indicated that girls were generally more reactive to unpleasant materials.

The effects of age and gender on sleep EEG power spectral density were assessed in a group of 100 subjects aged 20 to 60 years. We propose a new statistical strategy (mixed-model using fixed-knot regression splines) to analyze quantitative EEG measures. The effect of gender varied according to frequency, but no interactions emerged between age and gender, suggesting that the aging process does not differentially influence men and women. Women had higher power density than men in delta, theta, low alpha, and high spindle frequency range. The effect of age varied according to frequency and across the night. The decrease in power with age was not restricted to slow-wave activity, but also included theta and sigma activity. With increasing age, the attenuation over the night in power density between 1.25 and 8.00 Hz diminished, and the rise in power between 12.25 and 14.00 Hz across the night decreased. Increasing age was associated with higher power in the beta range. These results suggest that increasing age may be related to an attenuation of homeostatic sleep pressure and to an increase in cortical activation during sleep.

Interhemispheric interactions were studied with functional brain mapping of visual processing. Children performed a reaction time task with uni- and bilateral targets and nontargets. The visual evoked potential (VEP) was segmented into P1a, P1b, and N1 microstates using map rather than channel features. Map latencies, amplitudes and sources were tested for bilateral interactions. Bilateral targets yielded shorter VEP map latencies but later response onsets than unilateral ones. Source analyses of the unilateral VEPs indicated a transition from contra- (P1a) to ipsilateral (P1b) visual cortex activation (interhemispheric transfer). Bilateral VEPs were smaller than the summed unilateral VEPs in all microstates, indicating that interhemispheric interactions both precede and follow interhemispheric transfer. Brain mapping of uni- and bilateral VEPs in children thus revealed several distinct forms of interhemispheric interactions in the same, early time range.

Little is known about the effects of environmental enrichment on psychophysiological measures of arousal and orienting in humans. This study tests the hypothesis that early educational and health enrichment is associated with long-term increases in psychophysiological orienting and arousal. One hundred children were experimentally assigned to a two-year enriched nursery school intervention at ages 3–5 years and matched at age 3 years on psychophysiological measures, gender, and ethnicity to 100 comparisons who received the normal educational experience. Children were retested 6–8 years later at age 11 years on skin conductance (SC) and electroencephalogram (EEG) measures of arousal and attention during pre- and postexperimental rest periods and during the continuous performance task. Nursery enrichment was associated with increased SC amplitudes, faster SC rise times, faster SC recovery times, and less slow-wave EEG during both rest and CPT conditions. This is believed to be the first study to show that early environmental enrichment is associated with long-term increases in psychophysiological orienting and arousal in humans. Results draw attention to the important influence of the early environment in shaping later psychophysiological functioning.

Processing of emotion information by maltreated and control children was assessed with event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Maltreated children, for whom negative facial displays may be especially salient, and demographically comparable peers were tested to increase knowledge of differential processing of emotion information. ERPs were measured while children responded to pictures depicting facial displays of anger, fear, and happiness. Maltreated children showed larger P3b amplitude when angry faces appeared as targets than did control children; the two groups did not differ when targets were either happy or fearful facial expressions or for nontargets of any emotional content. These results indicate that aberrant emotional experiences associated with maltreatment may alter the allocation of attention and sensitivity that children develop to process specific emotion information.

We investigated psychophysiological responses to fear and anger inductions during real-life and imagination. Female participants (N = 158) were assigned to a fear-treatment, fear-control, anger-treatment, or anger-control group. Context (real-life, imagination) was varied in two sessions of fixed order. Eleven self-report and 29 somatovisceral variables were registered. Results showed that (a) except during anger imagination, control groups were emotionless; (b) in control groups, contexts prompted diverging somatovisceral responses, but similar emotion self-reports; except during fear imagination, the emotion inductions (c) were successful and (d) produced specific emotion reports; (e) during real-life, somatovisceral fear and anger responses exhibited a marked cardiovascular defense reflex; (f) in addition, real-life fear showed an adrenaline-like specific response pattern, whereas real-life anger showed specific forehead temperature and EMG extensor increases, accompanied by an elevated DBP during imagination. A Component Model of Somatovisceral Response Organization is proposed.

This study provides the first psychophysiological analysis of narcissism by measuring autonomic responses during active and passive anticipatory coping in 40 undergraduate men who scored high or low on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). Compared to the low NPI group, the high NPI group showed greater preejection period (PEP) shortening, cardiac deceleration, and skin conductance response (SCR) habituation during anticipation of an aversive stimulus (p < .02). As expected, SCR and PEP reactivity were greater during active than passive coping. In the case of PEP, this effect emerged only in the low NPI group; the high NPI group showed the greatest PEP reactivity during the first task, regardless of coping demands. These data support hypothesized relationships among narcissism, psychopathy, and psychological predictors of cardiovascular disease, and suggest that a psychobiological dimension may underlie important features of narcissism.

Language processing was investigated using event-related potentials obtained using a multichannel (58-channel) EEG system, with regard to semantic dependency (i.e., selectional restriction between a verb and the arguments it takes; the SR type) and syntactic dependency between sentence-final particles and interrogative phrases (the WH-Q type) in Japanese. It was found that semantic violations elicited the conventional N400, which was distributed in the bilateral occipital and the right temporal regions, and that the syntactic violations elicited the P600 in a broad area, predominantly in the centroparietal regions. Scalp current density mappings suggested that the right temporal cortex plays a significant role in integrating pieces of contextual information, especially when it is difficult to integrate a word in the context of a sentence, and that the P600 was connected to the syntactic processes conceivably indexed by the left temporal current sink with a relatively early onset.

The mismatch negativity (MMN) was used as a probe to evaluate changes, with age, of transient auditory memory. Subjects were 16 young (M = 23 years) and 16 old (M = 72 years) people. Standard auditory stimuli were presented in trains of eight tones (1000 Hz) with either a 1-s or 8-s intertrain interval (ITI). Occasionally, the first stimulus of a train was replaced with a 1200 Hz tone (deviant). The MMN was recorded while subjects watched a silent movie and ignored the sounds. Both groups of subjects showed an MMN response to deviant stimuli under the 1-s ITI condition, but MMNs were only seen for some subjects under the 8-s ITI condition. After MMN recording, subjects performed a discrimination task to the tones used for recording MMNs. Accuracy for both groups was near 100% at both ITIs. These results suggest that generation of MMN is a function of the perceptual grouping of the acoustical stimuli and that the integrity of perceptual grouping may be maintained with increased age.

Increased frequency of anticipatory saccades during smooth pursuit eye movements is a potential marker of genetic risk for schizophrenia. Postsaccadic slowing criteria are used to separate anticipatory from other types of saccades. However, the necessary duration of slowed pursuit required to identify an anticipatory saccade remains undetermined. We explored the effect of various postsaccadic slowing duration criteria on effect size in a comparison of younger and older schizophrenic and normal adults. For large anticipatory saccades, varying the duration of postsaccadic slowing criteria did not notably change effect size. For smaller leading saccades, a limited 50-ms duration postsaccadic slowing criterion produced the largest effect size (1.54), and maintained a similar effect size across a broad age range. Leading saccades with a limited duration postsaccadic slowing criteria are a possible marker of genetic risk for schizophrenia.

Temporal auditory processing deficits are thought to play an important role in some pathologies of speech understanding difficulties. The purposes of the present study were to determine whether short silent gaps within a pure tone can be used to elicit mismatch negativity (MMN) as an objective measure of temporal resolution, and to investigate the relation between MMN and performance on a behavioral gap-detection task. The stimuli used for both tasks were 1-kHz sinusoids presented in a low-pass masking noise. Behavioral gap-detection thresholds were determined using an adaptive three-alternative forced-choice procedure. To elicit MMN, a series of deviant stimuli with varying gap durations was generated and presented in an oddball paradigm among standard stimuli without a gap. Only the gaps larger than the mean behavioral gap-detection threshold evoked a clear MMN. There was no clear relation between psychoacoustic and MMN thresholds.

We used a novel application of principal components analysis (spatiotemporal PCA) to decompose the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) obtained with a dense electrode array, with the purpose of elucidating the late ERP components elicited by deviant stimuli under “attend” and “ignore” conditions. First, a “spatial” PCA was performed to identify a set of scalp distributions (spatial factors or “virtual electrodes”) that accounted for the spatial variance in the data set. The data were expressed as spatial factor scores or “virtual ERPs” measured at each of the virtual electrodes. These virtual ERPs were submitted to a “temporal” PCA, yielding a set of temporal factors or “virtual epochs.” Statistical analyses of the temporal factor scores found that (1) attended deviant stimuli elicited the P300 and Novelty P3 components, the latter being largest for highly salient nontargets; (2) “ignored” deviants elicited a small Novelty P3, and depending on the primary task, a small P300; and (3) the classical Slow Wave consisted of separate frontal-negative and posterior-positive components.

Brain mechanisms extracting invariant information from varying auditory inputs were studied using the mismatch-negativity (MMN) brain response. We wished to determine whether the preattentive sound-analysis mechanisms, reflected by MMN, are capable of extracting invariant relationships based on abstract conjunctions between two sound features. The standard stimuli varied over a large range in frequency and intensity dimensions following the rule that the higher the frequency, the louder the intensity. The occasional deviant stimuli violated this frequency–intensity relationship and elicited an MMN. The results demonstrate that preattentive processing of auditory stimuli extends to unexpectedly complex relationships between the stimulus features.