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Updated: May 31, 2026
Detecting Pre-Stimulus Source-Level Effects on Object Perception with Magnetoencephalography
Published on: July 26, 2019
The effects of subjectively significant stimuli on subsequent cognitive brain activity
1Evoked Potentials Laboratory, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel. ofek.einat@gmail.com
Objective:
To study brain activity modulation by preceding subjectively significant stimuli. Brain activity related to emotional and cognitive processing has been typically traced with fMRI's temporal resolution of seconds. In this study, the time course of activation in the brain areas involved was traced with millisecond temporal resolution.
Methods:
Electrophysiological brain activity was recorded while 12 normal subjects performed an auditory cued attention task, with subjectively significant verbal distracters. Verbal distracters, administered at different times between the cue and the target in one third of the trials, were first names, whose subjective significance was individually assessed after the experiment using a validated questionnaire. Intracranial sources of scalp-recorded electrical activity were estimated and statistical comparisons were conducted to assess the effects and interactions of (1) cue validity; and (2) subjective significance of distracters, on brain activity evoked by the targets.
Results:
Significant cue validity effects were found. Language-related areas were most involved following neutral distracters. Emotion-related areas were most involved following subjectively significant distracters. Thus, cue validity and distracter effects seem to have distinct effects.
Significance:
The results indicate an effect of subjectively significant distracters on subsequent brain activity with an interaction between cognitive and emotional processes.
