Properties of the Event-Related Potentials during the Target Selection Task

- Toward the Development of the Cognitive Assessment System -

Abstract

We have been developing an EEG-based communication aid “Neurocommunicator” (NC) for people with severe motor disabilities. The NC utilizes an event-related potential (ERP), the cognitive component of the EEG. Here, we studied the feasibility of the NC for the cognitive assessment to detect subtle symptoms of mild cognitive impairment. We recorded the EEG data from 40 normal adult subjects, as the control group, during the target only task, the oddball target task, and the target selection task. We supposed that the task became more difficult in this order. While we observed the ERP to the targets in all tasks, the differential response between the target and the nontargets systematically changed by the task difficulty. These results suggest that the combination of these three tasks could have potential to reveal the cognitive processes such as bottom-up and top-down attention, which should be important to evaluate the cognitive impairment.