ERPs and the Dynamics of Adaptive Attentional Control in the Prefrontal Cortex

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Brain electrical activity as measured at the scalp has been a staple of research on cognitive and emotional information processing using two strategies: one uses ongoing brainwave patterns in the EEG and the other uses EEG segments, known as event-related potentials, that are time-locked to repeated important mental events such as the perception of a stimulus. In both cases, one needs to average over many trials to find the associated consistent patterns, resulting in two serious limitations of these traditional methods: (1) since the scalp EEG represents a mixture of signals from various cortical networks, it is difficult to be specific about the relationship between the activity measured at the scalp and the neural function of interest; and (2) there is no information available concerning the dynamic relations between these neural functions across regions of the cortex. We now have ways to address both these limitations and make them practical for both the research lab and the clinic. We propose that these measures have promise of being more sensitive than standard assessment measures used in either setting.