title: Causality in the association between P300 and alpha event-related desynchronization.
abstract: Recent findings indicated that both P300 and alpha event-related desynchronization (α-ERD) were associated, and similarly involved in cognitive brain functioning, e.g., attention allocation and memory updating. However, an explicit causal influence between the neural generators of P300 and α-ERD has not yet been investigated. In the present study, using an oddball task paradigm, we assessed the task effect (target vs. non-target) on P300 and α-ERD elicited by stimuli of four sensory modalities, i.e., audition, vision, somatosensory, and pain, estimated their respective neural generators, and investigated the information flow among their neural generators using time-varying effective connectivity in the target condition. Across sensory modalities, the scalp topographies of P300 and α-ERD were similar and respectively maximal at parietal and occipital regions in the target condition. Source analysis revealed that P300 and α-ERD were mainly generated from posterior cingulate cortex and occipital lobe respectively. As revealed by time-varying effective connectivity, the cortical information was consistently flowed from α-ERD sources to P300 sources in the target condition for all four sensory modalities. All these findings showed that P300 in the target condition is modulated by the changes of α-ERD, which would be useful to explore neural mechanism of cognitive information processing in the human brain.
authors.affiliation: Department of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
authors.forename: Weiwei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Peng
authors.forename: Li
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hu
authors.forename: Zhiguo
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Yong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Hu
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000513:Alpha Rhythm; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003071:Cognition; D003344:Cortical Synchronization / Q000502:physiology*; D004594:Electrophysiology; D018913:Event-Related Potentials, P300 / Q000502:physiology*; D005073:Evoked Potentials, Somatosensory; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010146:Pain; D010775:Photic Stimulation