Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
3047844 Clinical Neurophysiology 2007 12 Pages PDF
Abstract

ObjectiveThe anticipation of complex cognitive tasks involves effortful preparation being reflected in the contingent negative variation (CNV) of the event-related potential. In the literature there are contradictory results concerning the effect of age on this potential. We wanted to investigate effects of age, time-on-task, and task difficulty on the CNV.MethodYoung and middle-aged participants performed a visual search and a non-search task during an early and a late phase of a 6-h session.ResultsPerformance data revealed increased response times and error rates for middle-aged vs. young participants. Most importantly, an increased frontal CNV amplitude was found for the older participants, especially pronounced in the search task. A late positivity which was elicited to the offset of the preceding stimulus was increased for the middle-aged vs. young group in the visual search task only. There was no effect of time-on-task on performance, but the CNV became larger with time-on-task in the search task while it became smaller in the non-search task.ConclusionsThe results suggest an enhancement of effortful task preparation for middle-aged participants especially when the task is difficult.SignificanceThis underlines the role of the CNV as a neurophysiological indicator for effortful cognitive preparation.

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