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- Title
Are the P600 and P3 ERP components linked to the task‐evoked pupillary response as a correlate of norepinephrine activity?
- Authors
Contier, Friederike; Wartenburger, Isabell; Weymar, Mathias; Rabovsky, Milena
- Abstract
During language comprehension, anomalies and ambiguities in the input typically elicit the P600 event‐related potential component. Although traditionally interpreted as a specific signal of combinatorial operations in sentence processing, the component has alternatively been proposed to be a variant of the oddball‐sensitive, domain‐general P3 component. In particular, both components might reflect phasic norepinephrine release from the locus coeruleus (LC/NE) to motivationally significant stimuli. In this preregistered study, we tested this hypothesis by relating both components to the task‐evoked pupillary response, a putative biomarker of LC/NE activity. 36 participants completed a sentence comprehension task (containing 25% morphosyntactic violations) and a non‐linguistic oddball task (containing 20% oddballs), while the EEG and pupil size were co‐registered. Our results showed that the task‐evoked pupillary response and the ERP amplitudes of both components were similarly affected by both experimental tasks. In the oddball task, there was also a temporally specific relationship between the P3 and the pupillary response beyond the shared oddball effect, thereby further linking the P3 to NE. Because this link was less reliable in the linguistic context, we did not find conclusive evidence for or against a relationship between the P600 and the pupillary response. Still, our findings further stimulate the debate on whether language‐related ERPs are indeed specific to linguistic processes or shared across cognitive domains. However, further research is required to verify a potential link between the two ERP positivities and the LC/NE system as the common neural generator. We investigated the relationship between late, positive ERP components and the task‐evoked pupillary response, a proposed marker of norepinephrine release. While we did find evidence of such a link regarding the oddball‐sensitive P3, evidence regarding the language related P600 was more mixed. Further replication is required to verify whether the two components belong to the same family of positivities, reflecting transient norepinephrine activity in response to rare and motivationally significant stimuli.
- Subjects
PUPILLARY reflex; PUPILLOMETRY; NORADRENALINE; LOCUS coeruleus; LINGUISTIC context; EVOKED potentials (Electrophysiology)
- Publication
Psychophysiology, 2024, Vol 61, Issue 7, p1
- ISSN
0048-5772
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/psyp.14565