Auditory novelty oddball allows reliable distinction of top-down and bottom-up processes of attention.
An auditory novelty-oddball task, which is known to evoke a P3 event-related potential (ERP) in a target condition and a novelty-P3 ERP in response to task-irrelevant unique environmental sounds, was repeatedly applied to healthy participants (n = 14) on two separate recording sessions, 7 days apart. Both target-P3 and novelty-P3 were internally consistent and test-retest reliable. Interestingly, novelty-P3 amplitude declined from the first to the second half of each recording session, whereas no systematic alteration between both sessions occurred. The target-P3 showed the opposite pattern, i.e. a reduced amplitude from the first to the second session, but no systematic change within each session. These findings suggest that novelty-P3 amplitude changes reflect habituation, whereas target-P3 session effects may indicate the adjusted amount of processing resources invested into the task. In general, the results support the interpretation of the novelty-P3 as indicating automatic, bottom-up related aspects of attention, whereas the target-P3, in the present paradigm, seems to reflect voluntary, top-down related aspects of attention.
Debener
S
S
Institute of Medicine, Research Center Jülich, Jülich D-52425, Germany. s.debener@fz-juelich.de
Kranczioch
C
C
Herrmann
C S
CS
Engel
A K
AK
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results