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

在头皮上测量的脑电活动一直是认知和情绪信息处理研究的主要内容，使用两种策略：一种使用脑电图中持续的脑电波模式，另一种使用被称为事件相关电位的脑电图片段，它被时间锁定在重复的重要心理事件上，如对刺激的感知。在这两种情况下，人们都需要对许多试验进行平均才能找到相关的一致模式，这导致了这些传统方法的两个严重局限性：(1)由于头皮脑电图代表了来自各种皮层网络的混合信号，因此很难具体说明在头皮测量的活动与感兴趣的神经功能之间的关系；(2)没有关于这些神经功能在皮层区域之间的动态关系的信息。我们现在有办法解决这两个限制，并使它们在研究实验室和诊所都实用。我们建议，这些措施有希望比在这两种情况下使用的标准评估措施更加敏感。

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.