Comparisons Based on Event-related Potentials in Dental Students with Different Levels of Experience Knowledge

Abstract

The information handling processes for character and tooth recognition tasks were compared between the dental students who had acquired different knowledge levels. The subjects included 20 second-year students who had acquired textbook-based knowledge and 20 fifth-year students who had acquired both textbook-based and experience knowledge though ongoing clinical exercise. The task was to differentiate diagrams depicting a “katakana character” or a “tooth”. The diagrams were randomly presented at a ratio of 2: 8 according to the oddball paradigm. The subjects were instructed to push a button only when a target stimulus was presented. Average waveforms were determined by averaging ERP waveforms derived at Pz for a principal component analysis(PCA).

The results showed the same trends in information for character diagrams in both year students; the contribution rates of the PCA component representing pattern matching or attention-orientation as well as working memory update was higher. Similar trends were observed in information for tooth diagrams in terms of a greater percentage of the PCA components represented cognition and decision and behavior performance, but in the fifthyear students P3a that represented attention-orientation was extracted independently.

These results indicate similar information in both-year students for the character task,whereas fifth-year students who had acquired experience knowledge appeared to make their decisions based on more effective thinking for the tooth task.