The independency of the Bereitschaftspotential from previous stimulus‐locked P3 in visuomotor response tasks

Abstract

The Bereitschaftspotential (BP) and the P3 are well‐known ERPs usually observed during self‐paced and externally triggered tasks. Recently, the BP was also detected in externally triggered tasks before stimulus onset. However, doubts have been raised about the authenticity of the BP in these tasks due to possible overlaps with the previous trial P3 (hereinafter s‐1 P3). Here, we aim to test the authenticity of the BP in externally triggered tasks by comparing ERPs obtained during two visuomotor response tasks with different interstimulus intervals (ISIs) allowing (short‐ISI; 1,000–2,000 ms) or not (long‐ISI; 2,000–4,000 ms) P3‐BP overlaps. In line with previous research, we hypothesize that BP and the s‐1 P3 contribute independently to the scalp‐detected activities during these tasks. ERPs were recorded from 14 healthy participants during the short‐ISI and long‐ISI visuomotor response tasks. Amplitudes and latencies of pre‐ (BP and pN) and poststimulus ERP components (P1, pN1, pP1, N1, pP2, dpP2, N2, P3) were compared between conditions. No effect of ISI was found on the amplitude of any pre‐ and poststimulus components. In contrast, longer ISI is associated with earlier onsets of the BP and pN components. In visuomotor response tasks, the BP is independent from the P3 elicited by the previous trial (s‐1 P3), even using relatively short ISI. Since the different ISIs did not affect the amplitude of the BP and the P3 components, we conclude that also a short ISI can be adopted safely and conveniently to keep a reasonable duration of the overall experiment.

Preparatory ERPs in visual, auditory, and somatosensory discriminative motor tasks

“…For both tasks, the use of a jittered inter‐stimulus interval smoothed the temporal overlap between brain activities related to the preceding and to the current trial. In a previous manuscript of the present research group (Quinzi, Berchicci, Bianco, Perri, & Di Russo, 2019), we showed a lack of influence of post‐stimulus ERPs of the preceding trial on the current trial. A sketch of the two tasks is shown in Figure 1.…”

Cerebral mechanisms of hypnotic hypoesthesia. An ERP investigation on the expectancy stage of perception

“…The pre‐stimulus stage of processing allowed us to tell expectancy‐related activity from the one yielded by the stimulus administration. Since it was previously shown that with such a signal segmentation the late stimulus‐evoked ERPs do not contaminate the analysis of the preparatory activity in the next trial (Quinzi, Berchicci, Bianco, Perri, & Di Russo, 2019), we may assume that our findings are not driven by post stimulus processing for which hypnosis effects emerged until the P250 component (Perri et al., 2019). In other terms, unlike brain imaging techniques, ERPs allowed a sharp separation of the neural correlates of the disposition in receiving the stimulus from the activities of stimulus processing.…”

Effects of a Cognitive-Motor Training on Anticipatory Brain Functions and Sport Performance in Semi-Elite Basketball Players

“…To evaluate pre-stimulus activity, EEG was segmented into 1300 ms epochs, starting 1100 ms before and ending 200 ms after stimulus onset. In line with previous studies [ 40 , 41 ], the baseline was applied to the first 200 ms (−1100/−900 ms) in which the signal was flat and stable. Given that the knowledge of stimulus category was unpredictable at this stage of processing, target and non-target trials were averaged together.…”