PubMed Health⌕ Search
Home/Archive/PubMed

PubMed · 15076771

Sensory ERPs predict differences in working memory span and fluid intelligence.

Carrie R Brumback·Kathy A Low·Gabriele Gratton·Monica Fabiani
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The way our brain reacts to sensory stimulation may provide important clues about higher-level cognitive function and its operation. Here we show that short-latency (< 200 ms) sensory cortical responses elicited by visual and auditory stimuli differ dramatically between subjects with high and low working-memory span, as well as between subjects scoring high and low on a fluid intelligence test. Our findings also suggest that this link between sensory responses and complex cognitive tasks is modality specific (visual sensory measures correlate with visuo-spatial tasks whereas auditory sensory measures correlate with verbal tasks). We interpret these findings as indicating that people's effectiveness in controlling attention and gating sensory information is a critical determinant of individual differences in complex cognitive abilities.

Explore related subjects

Acoustic StimulationAdultAttentionAuditory CortexAuditory PerceptionCerebral CortexCognitionEvoked PotentialsFemaleHumansIntelligenceMaleMemory, Short-TermNeuropsychological TestsPhotic StimulationPredictive Value of TestsReaction TimeSensationVisual CortexVisual PerceptionJournal ArticleResearch Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Carrie R Brumback, Kathy A Low, Gabriele Gratton, Monica Fabiani. 2004-02-09. Sensory ERPs predict differences in working memory span and fluid intelligence.. https://doi.org/10.1097/00001756-200402090-00032

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related citations

PubMed2007

Neural responses elicited to face motion and vocalization pairings.

During social interactions our brains continuously integrate incoming auditory and visual input from the movements and vocalizations of others. Yet, the dynamics of the neural events elicited to these multisensory stimuli remain largely uncharacterized. Here we recorded audiovisual scalp event-related potentials (ERPs) to dynamic human faces with associated human vocalizations. Audiovisual controls were a dynamic monkey face with a species-appropriate vocalization, and a house with opening front door with a creaking door sound. Subjects decided if audiovisual stimulus trials were congruent (e.g. human face-human sound) or incongruent (e.g. house image-monkey sound). An early auditory ERP component, N140, was largest to human and monkey vocalizations. This effect was strongest in the presence of the dynamic human face, suggesting that species-specific visual information can modulate auditory ERP characteristics. A motion-induced visual N170 did not change amplitude or latency across visual motion category in the presence of sound. A species-specific incongruity response consisting of a late positive ERP at around 400 ms, P400, was selectively larger only when human faces were mismatched with a non-human sound. We also recorded visual ERPs at trial onset, and found that the category-specific N170 did not alter its behavior as a function of stimulus category-somewhat unexpected as two face types were contrasted with a house image. In conclusion, we present evidence for species-specificity in vocalization selectivity in early ERPs, and in a multisensory incongruity response whose amplitude is modulated only when the human face motion is paired with an incongruous auditory stimulus.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2007

Negotiations within the family over the supply of parental care.

Adults provisioning dependent young are in conflict with their partners, who would prefer a greater level of effort, and with their offspring, who would prefer a greater supply of food. To what extent, then should adults negotiate their provisioning behaviour with other family members? We used experimental manipulations of brood size, and targeted playback of begging calls to determine the extent to which adult great tits Parus major adjust their provisioning rates in response to the behaviour of their partner and their brood. We found that males and females behaved similarly, both responding more to each other's behaviour than to chick calling. We also found that the degree to which adults negotiated their provisioning rates with each other varied between years. A review of the literature suggests that the extent of negotiation over provisioning is likely to vary not only between species of diverse taxa, but also between and within (this study) populations of the same species. We suggest that provisioning behaviour lies on a 'negotiation continuum', which describes the extent to which parents respond to the actions of other family members. We argue that an individual's location on the 'negotiation continuum' is determined partly by the extent to which it can physically respond to the behaviour shown by other members of the family and partly by the quality of information on offer.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2007

Volitional control of attention and brain activation in dual task performance.

This study used functional MRI (fMRI) to examine the neural effects of willfully allocating one's attention to one of two ongoing tasks. In a dual task paradigm, participants were instructed to focus either on auditory sentence comprehension, mental rotation, or both. One of the major findings is that the distribution of brain activation was amenable to strategic control, such that the amount of activation per task was systematically related to the attention-dividing instructions. The activation in language processing regions was lower when attending to mental rotation than when attending to the sentences, and the activation in visuospatial processing regions was lower when attending to sentences than when attending to mental rotations. Additionally, the activation was found to be underadditive, with the dual-task condition eliciting less activation than the sum of the attend sentence and attend rotation conditions. We also observed a laterality shift across conditions within language-processing regions, with the attend sentence condition showing bilateral activation, while the dual task condition showed a left hemispheric dominance. This shift suggests multiple language-processing modes and may explain the underadditivity in activation observed in the current and previous studies.

Acoustic Stimulation↗