Unexpected events can have internal causes (action errors) as well as external causes (perceptual novelty). Both events call for adaptations of ongoing behavior, resulting, amongst other things, in post-error and post-novelty slowing (PES/PNS) of reaction times (RT). Both types of events are processed in prefrontal brain areas, indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs): Errors are followed by ...

This study investigated the role of stimulus deviance in determining electrophysiologic and behavioral responses to "novelty." Stimulus deviance was defined in terms of differences either from the immediately preceding context or from long-term experience. Subjects participated in a visual event-related potential (ERP) experiment, in which they controlled the duration of stimulus viewing with a...

Delta oscillations contribute to the human P300 event-related potential evoked by oddball targets, although it is unclear whether they index contextual novelty (event oddballness, novelty P3, nP3), or target-related processes (event targetness, target P3b). To examine this question, the electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded during a cued task-switching version of the Wisconsin card-sorting te...

Viewing emotionally negative pictures has been proposed to attenuate brain responses towards sudden auditory events, as more attentional resources are allocated to the affective visual stimuli. However, peripheral reflexes have been shown intensified. These observations have raised the question of whether an emotional context actually facilitates or attenuates processing in the auditory novelty...

The goal of this study was to evaluate the patterns of age-dependent changes of P3 components of auditory event-related potentials exploring the effects of task difficulty. The participants (age span: 19-68 years, n=55, divided into five age groups) took part in an easy and in a difficult two-tone oddball frequency discrimination task with speed or accuracy instructions, and in a novelty oddbal...

Previous research on age-related changes in ERP components in response to novel and target stimuli has not carefully controlled for differences in level of cognitive status between age groups, which may have contributed to the common findings of increased P3 latency, decreased P3 amplitude, and altered P3 scalp distribution. Here, cognitively high-performing (top third based on published norms)...

Recent research indicates that non-tonal novel events, deviating from an ongoing auditory environment, elicit a positive event-related potential (ERP), the novel P3. Although a variety of studies examined the neural network engaged in novelty detection, there is no complete picture of the underlying brain mechanisms. This experiment investigated these neural mechanisms by combining ERP and func...

Items that are distinctive with respect to their context tend to be recalled better than nondistinctive items, a finding known as the von Restorff effect. The goal of this study was to elucidate the role of novelty in this effect. In two experiments, participants performed a dual task in which they had to study words presented visually while to-be ignored sounds were played over earphones. Soun...