Phenotypic Markers in Event-Related Potentials

Abstract

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) are a noninvasive method of measuring brain activity during cognitive processing. ERPs can be recorded from all of the primary sensory modalities (visual, auditory, somatosensory, and gustatory) and from motor events (e.g., a button press). ERPs are voltage fluctuations in the electroencephalogram (EEG) that are time-locked to sensory, motor, or cognitive events (e.g., the presentation of an image or sound) and reflect coordinated neural network activity in the brain. ERPs provide a neurophysiological reflection of the processing of events and can provide an insight into very early stages of information processing. Since ERPs have excellent temporal resolution, to the level of milliseconds, they are a "real-time" representation of the processing of an event. Because of their high temporal resolution, noninvasiveness, relatively low cost, and ability to provide a continuous measure of the brain's information processing, ERPs have been widely adopted by cognitive neuroscientists, psychologists, psycholinguists, and neurologists to study normal cognitive processing and functions at different developmental stages, as well as to illuminate how and why these cognitive processes are altered in neurological and psychiatric disorders. Endophenotypes are heritable, disease-associated neurophysiological, cognitive, or neurobiological traits that are believed to be in the etiological pathway (i.e., intermediate) between risk genotype and the clinical syndrome but to be more proximally related to the genetic substrate than the higher order construct of a "disorder". As the ERP literature is very large, this chapter selectively describes six ERP phenotypes that are commonly studied in neuropsychiatric disorders. Each ERP phenotype may be useful in diagnosis prediction, identifying genetic susceptibility, and understanding cognitive behavior and brain function. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)