P300, probability, and interstimulus interval

The relationship between target stimulus probability and interstimulus interval on the P300 (P3) component of the event-related potential was assessed in three experiments. In each study an auditory discrimination paradigm was employed wherein subjects indicated with a finger tap response the occurrence of a randomly presented 2000 Hz target tone embedded in a series of 1,000 Hz tones. Target stimuli were presented with a probability of either .20 or .80 in different conditions which were combined factorially with different interstimulus intervals. Experiment 1 presented stimuli at 2.0, 2.5, or 3.0 second intervals; Experiment 2 presented stimuli at 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0 second intervals; Experiment 3 presented stimuli at 4.0, 6.0, or 10.0 second intervals. P3 amplitude was larger for the .20 relative to the .80 target probability conditions for the shorter interstimulus intervals but not for the longer intervals. P3 latency was consistently longer for the .20 relative to the .80 target probability conditions, with generally little effect observed for interstimulus interval changes. The results suggest that interstimulus interval affects component amplitude by determining the amount of processing resources available when the P3 is produced.