**3.1 P100 and N100 (P1 and N1)**

Eason et al. (1969) found that visual stimuli situated in visual fields with focused attention elicited components with larger amplitude (approximately 100 ms after stimulus onset, P1 and N1), compared with ignored or unnoticed stimuli. This amplitude enhancement is at its maximum in the temporal-occipital region, contralateral to the localization of the stimuli and is sensitive to the specific localization of the stimuli in the visual field (Mangun et al., 1993). Comparable results were obtained in the auditory modality by a dichotic listening paradigm (Hillyard et al., 1973). This auditory early-attention effect reflects a response increase of the auditory primary cortex (Woldorff et al., 1993). The P1 and N1 components are also modulated by several factors in the attentional task, such as emotional saliency, relevance or familiarity.

#### **3.2 P200 (or P2)**

Is a positive deflection occurring approximately 200 ms after the onset of the stimulus? P200 has been interpreted as reecting selective attention (Hackley, Woldorff and Hillyard, 1990) and visual-feature detection processes (Luck and Hillyard, 1994). Similarly, P2 has been

Event-Related Potential Studies of Cognitive and Social Neuroscience 401

distance between a target and a preceding outgoing stimulus (e.g., Cornejo et al., 2007). There are two sub-components (P3a and P3b). The P3a has a more frontal distribution and is observed after an unexpected event, regardless of the relevance of the stimulus. Usually, it is associated with automatic attentional modulation. The P3b is related to attention, working memory and superior cognitive functions and is observed at centro-parietal sites. This ERP is affected by several psychological processes, the most important of which are motivation

The late positive potential (LPP) is considered to be a family of components (although initially was described by Sutton in 1965 as a unique, frontal bilateral positivity). This late component (300 to 700 ms) is sensitive to stimuli valence and to the previous emotional context (Cacioppo et al., 1994, Schupp et al., 2000). Its amplitude, according to several studies, increases in response to motivationally relevant stimuli (i.e., pleasant or unpleasant images; Cuthbert et al., 2000; Schupp et al., 2000; Schupp, Junghofer, Weike and Hamm, 2004). The amplitude, latency and topography of LPP are modulated by the semantic emotional valence of stimuli (Cunningham et al., 2007) and contextual information (Cornejo et al., 2009; Hurtado et al., 2009). The late positive complex (LPC) is a component similar to LPP and has been related to the process of re-analysis of the incongruent situation produced by inconsistent meaning (Ibanez et al., 2010a, 2011b; Sitnikova, Kuperberg and Holcomb, 2003). The P600 is considered to be an index for second pass-parsing processes of information processing, having much in common with working memory operations. It is associated with superior frontal, temporal and parietal regions, which are believed to

contribute to some aspects of information processing during recognition memory.

The N400 is a negative component that appears around 400 ms after the presentation of semantically unrelated information between two words or between a context and a word. Although this component was first studied in the linguistic field, recent studies have extended previous results to richer action sequences and pictorial stimuli (sometimes called N350 or N400-like), such as congruent-incongruent pictures or videos of gestures, actions and motor events (Aravena et al., 2010; Cornejo et al., 2009; Proverbio et al., 2010; Ibañez et al., 2010b, 2011; Guerra et al., 2009; Sitnikova et al., 2003). Although spatial resolution provided by ERP does not allow a precise localization of N400 neural generators, evidence from lesion studies, MEG and intracranial recordings converge to implicate temporal areas (left superior/middle temporal gyrus, the anterior-medial temporal lobe, the PHC and anterior fusiform gyrus) as the possible sources of N400 (Van Petten and Luka, 2006). This N400 points to a distributed and multimodal system that is simultaneously open to verbal

CNV is an extended and prolonged negative potential recorded during simple, warned reaction time paradigms from central and parietal scalp fields. Its scalp distribution always begins bilaterally and symmetrically at the midline of the precentral-parietal regions, approximately 1.000 to 1.500 ms before response movement. CNV is a correlate of anticipation of the latter presentation of a stimulus target (Picton and Hillyard, 1988; Walter,

and sustained attention.

**3.8 N400 and N400-like** 

**3.7 Late Positive Components (LPP, PPC, P600)** 

and nonverbal meanings (Kutas and Federmeier, 2000).

**3.9 Contingent Negative Variation (CNV)** 

Cooper, Aldridge, McCallum and Winter, 1964).

shown to be sensitive to orthographic/phonological tasks, semantic categorization tasks, reward-punishment discrimination and lexical decision tasks.
