An event-related potential study of temporal information encoding and decision making

Abstract

This research used event-related potentials to investigate the time course of temporal information encoding and decision making. Participants performed auditory temporal and pitch discrimination tasks within a S1-S2 matching paradigm, wherein two stimuli (S1-S2) are presented sequentially, and S2 is either the same as or different from S1. Event-related potentials results showed N1, P2 and contingent negative variation (CNV) amplitudes were higher during encoding than decision making. During the encoding phase, N1 and P2 amplitudes were lower in the temporal task than the pitch task. During the decision-making phase, the CNV amplitude was higher in the temporal task. Findings suggest N1, P2 and CNV are related to temporal encoding, albeit only CNV is related to temporal decision making.