THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN P300 EVOKED POTENTIALS AND PREFRONTAL CORTEX OXYGEN USE: A COMBINED EEG AND NIRS STUDY

The P300 subcomponent, P3b, is an event related potential detected at the scalp surface when a working memory comparison results in differences between the contents of working memory and incoming stimulus information. Previous research has indicated that as infrequent targets become more difficult to detect (morphologically similar to a frequent non-target stimulus) the P300 becomes attenuated. fMRI research has also indicated increased prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity during P300 generation. To examine the relationship between P3b amplitude and PFC activity participants performed an easy and difficult target detection task in both EEG and NIRS called the oddball. The EEG and behavioral results confirmed prior reports that difficult to detect targets result in attenuated P3b amplitude, as well as increased misses and reaction time, in comparison to easy to detect targets. NIRS results indicated that detection of targets generally lead to greater increases in oxygenated hemoglobin and decreases in deoxygenated hemoglobin in lateral compared to medial optodes. Additionally, oxygenated hemoglobin increased in the right medial PFC in easy compared to difficult conditions. Taken together, the results of this study and theories behind P3b attenuation suggest that the right medial PFC is involved in attention to salient stimulus features (bottom-up attention) and the lateral PFC is involved in sustained attention to the task (top-down attention). Thus, P3b attenuation is reflective of delimiting attention to salient features and allowing task driven attention to initiate the working memory comparison

Sustained, not habituated, activity in the human amygdala: A pilot fMRI dot-probe study of attentional bias to fearful faces

The human amygdala consciously and nonconsciously processes facial expressions and directs spatial attention to them. Research has shown that amygdala activity habituates after repeated exposure to emotionally salient stimuli during passive viewing tasks. However, it is unclear to what extent the amygdala habituates during biologically relevant amygdala-mediated behaviors, such as the orienting of attention to environmentally salient social signals. The present study investigated amygdala habituation during a dot-probe task measuring attentional bias to backward masked fearful faces. The results suggest that across the duration of the 50 min (1,098 trial) task both attentional bias behavior and amygdala activity were sustained—rather than habituated. Thus, these initial findings indicate that when biologically relevant behavior is sustained, so too is amygdala activation