ATTENTION SCORES AND ERP COMPONENTS IN SENSOMOTOR TASK

Abstract

Attention as a psychological characteristic could be described with additional behavioural and electrophysiological parameters. The purpose of this work was to investigate the relationship between attention parameters (Attention test – Brickenkamp d2) – concentration performance, processing speed, rule compliance (accuracy) and the changes in various ERP components (indicating sensory and cognitive information processing) in healthy volunteers. EEG (Fz, Cz, Pz, C3’ and C4’) was recorded in two series. In the first series, without any task, the persons had to listen to low frequency (800 Hz) and higher frequency (1000 Hz) tones presented in randomized order. In the second task condition, they had to react to a low tone by pressing a button with the right hand and react to a high tone in the audio sequence by pressing a button with the left hand. ERPs were averaged for each series, tone and electrode position. In the sensory-motor task series, we observed a relationship between parameters of the P3 component and the concentration performance attention parameter. We found a significantly shorter P3 latency and higher P3 amplitude in persons with higher concentration performance. As a whole, the obtained data showed that the attention processes concerning concentration performance could be related predominantly to the main cognitive and modality independent P3 component.