Impact of putamen stroke on task context updating: Evidence from P300 brain waves

According to the context updating theory, the oddball P300 component indexes brain activities underlying revision of the mental representation induced by incoming stimuli. It involves an attention-driven comparison process that evaluates the representation of the previous event in working memory. Delayed latencies have been reported for various types of stroke such as unilateral thalamic stroke. We investigated memory updating effects in patients with putamen stroke. Two groups of patients with putamen and thalamic stroke were recruited along with two control groups of young and old healthy participants. Auditory and visual P300 were elicited respectively in a two-stimulus oddball paradigm. The auditory P300 peak latencies were significantly longer in patients with a putamen lesion than in the aged and young control groups and the same pattern was found in the thalamus-lesioned patient. The delayed auditory P300 component in both patient groups but neither control group suggests impairment of memory updating in patients with putamen stroke comparable with thalamic stroke. Our study illustrates the important role of subcortical structures subserved in context updating.