Differences in the late components of the event-related potential due to age and to semantic and non-semantic tasks

Recent work in event-related potentials (ERPs) has revealed differences between ERPs elicited during the performance of semantic and nonsemantic tasks. This experiment examined age differences in the late components of the ERP as a function of these tasks. Young and elderly males were presented with 5-word strings on each trial. The subject's task was to decide whether or not the fifth word matched the other four. In one condition, the first 4 words were identical to one another and the fifth word was either the same or different. In the other condition, the first 4 words were different from one another but were drawn from from the same semantic category. The fifth word was either from the category or from a different category. Matches occurred in 15% of the trials and mismatches in 85%. The ERP to the fifth word was analyzed. All ERPs evidenced a late positive component (LPC), the latency of which was greater for the Category task and for mismatches. LPC amplitude was greater in the Identity task. In addition, young subjects' LPC amplitudes were greater for matches than for mismatches, whereas the reverse was true for the elderly. In agreement with previous research, our results indicated that an N400 wave is evident only in response to semantic incongruity and that variables affecting late positive activity seem to be independent of those producing N400. The N400 wave was seen at a greater latency in the elderly. Our results extend previous work (e.g., Kutas and Hillyard 1980) by finding an N400 in a semantic context other than sentences, and in concluding that this component is relatively insensitive to stimulus frequency.