Towards a Decision about P3b: Memory Processing or Decision Making?
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1
University of Lübeck, Germany
For decades it has been suggested that P3b has some privileged relation to memory processes. This suggestion has been revived in a recent review paper (Polich, Clin. Neurophys. 2007, 118:2128 pp.). This poster compiles some arguments against this suggestion. A) The brain regions that are affected in patients with memory disturbance (hippocampus and mesial temporal lobe, thalamus, prefrontal cortex) do not generate the scalp-recorded P3b. B) The brain regions that do generate P3b in parietal and temporal cortex do not have any close relationship to memory functions. C) ERPs evoked by events later recalled differ from ERPs evoked by other events by the “dm”. “dm” is smaller than P3b, frequently has a topography different from P3b, and may be entirely decoupled from P3b under certain circumstances. D) Researchers wishing to avoid P3b (for fear of overlap with, e.g., N400) do not care about their participants’ memorizing the critical stimuli but rather take care that no response has to be made to the critical stimuli. Therefore, P3b has nothing to do with memory but obviously is a correlate of participants’ decision how to respond to the stimuli. In contrast, a more direct relationship with memory may be assumed for P3a, because this component is markedly reduced if brain regions are damaged that are relevant to memory (hippocampus, thalamus, prefrontal cortex).
Conference:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, Bodrum, Türkiye, 1 Sep - 5 Sep, 2008.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Decision Making and Response Selection
Citation:
Verleger
R
(2008). Towards a Decision about P3b: Memory Processing or Decision Making?.
Conference Abstract:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.01.214
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Received:
08 Dec 2008;
Published Online:
08 Dec 2008.
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Correspondence:
Rolf Verleger, University of Lübeck, Luebeck, Germany, 665948@frontiersin.org