What is novel in the novelty oddball paradigm?
Institute of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, Center of Experimental Medicine, University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, D-20246 Hamburg, Germany. s.debener@uke.uni-hamburg.de To better understand whether voluntary attention affects how the brain processes novel events, variants of the auditory novelty oddball paradigm were presented to two different groups of human volunteers. One group of subjects (n=16) silently counted rarely presented ‘infrequent’ tones (p=0.10), interspersed with ‘novel’ task-irrelevant unique environmental sounds (p=0.10) and frequently presented ‘standard’ tones (p=0.80). A second group of subjects (n=17) silently counted the ‘novel’ environmental sounds, the ‘infrequent’ tones now serving as the task-irrelevant deviant events. Analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded from 63 scalp channels suggested a spatiotemporal overlap of fronto-central novelty P3 and centro-parietal P3 (P3b) ERP features in both groups. Application of independent component a
