%0 Journal Article
%T Causality in the Association between P300 and Alpha Event-Related Desynchronization
%A Weiwei Peng
%A Li Hu
%A Zhiguo Zhang
%A Yong Hu
%J PLOS ONE
%D 2012
%I Public Library of Science (PLoS)
%R 10.1371/journal.pone.0034163
%X Recent findings indicated that both P300 and alpha event-related desynchronization (¦Á-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 ¦Á-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 ¦Á-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 ¦Á-ERD were similar and respectively maximal at parietal and occipital regions in the target condition. Source analysis revealed that P300 and ¦Á-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 ¦Á-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 ¦Á-ERD, which would be useful to explore neural mechanism of cognitive information processing in the human brain.
%U http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0034163