EEG Microstates as a Functional Marker of Performance During Emotional Interference

In order to understand social interactions, integration of emotional valence and semantic information plays a pertinent role. Emotional interference is reflected as a decline in executive function in the presence of emotional stimuli (faces and valenced words). We hypothesise that apart from what we perceive, the intrinsic brain activity may also influence the behavioural outcome.

We aimed to investigate the role of the pre-stimulus EEG microstate in determining the performance of an individual in an emotional interference task.

Twenty healthy participants performed the emotional interference task, while microstate parameters were derived from single trial 128 channel EEG during correct and error trials.

We found that four microstate maps could represent the response accuracy of the preceding behavioural response during emotional interference. The intracranial generators of the pre-trial microstate during emotional interference revealed the areas related to phonological processing (middle temporal and superior temporal gyri), emotional processing (inferior parietal, parahippocampal, transverse temporal gyri), conflict resolution (inferior frontal gyrus and insula) and motor responses (pre-central gyrus).

In addition to the valence and semantics of the stimuli, the pre-stimulus microstate may help to determine subsequent performance.