TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hosseini, Mahan
AU  - Zivony, Alon
AU  - Eimer, Martin
AU  - Wyble, Brad
AU  - Bowman, Howard
TI  - Transient Attention Gates Access Consciousness: Coupling N2pc and P3 Latencies using Dynamic Time Warping
JO  - The journal of neuroscience
VL  - 44
IS  - 26
SN  - 0270-6474
CY  - Washington, DC
PB  - Soc.
M1  - FZJ-2024-03578
SP  - e1798232024 -
PY  - 2024
N1  - This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under (Grant Agreement No. 896192 to A.Z.) and from the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant No. ES/V002708/1 to M.E.).
AB  - The N2pc & P3 Event-Related Potentials (ERPs), used to index selective attention and access to working memory and conscious awareness, respectively, have been important tools in cognitive sciences. Although it is likely that these two components and the underlying cognitive processes are temporally and functionally linked, such links have not yet been convincingly demonstrated. Adopting a novel methodological approach based on Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), we provide evidence that the N2pc and P3 ERP components are temporally linked. We analysed data from an experiment where 23 participants (16 women) monitored bilateral rapid serial streams of letters and digits in order to report a target digit indicated by a shape cue, separately for trials with correct responses and trials where a temporally proximal distractor was reported instead (distractor intrusion). DTW analyses revealed that N2pc and P3 latencies were correlated in time, both when the target or a distractor was reported. Notably, this link was weaker on distractor intrusion trials. This N2pc-P3 association is discussed with respect to the relationship between attention and access consciousness. Our results demonstrate that our novel method provides a valuable approach for assessing temporal links between two cognitive processes and their underlying modulating factors. This method allows to establish links and their modulator for any two time-series across all domains of the field (general-purpose MATLAB functions and a Python module are provided alongside this paper).Significance Statement We provide evidence for a temporal link between two important Event Related Potential components, the N2pc and P3.We establish that the N2pc-P3 link is stronger after correct responses, which provides a new perspective on how links between attention and WM encoding affect the quality of performance and the content of access consciousness.We demonstrate that our Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) based method can be adopted to identify yet unknown factors modulating the relationship between two cognitive processes. This method is able to assess temporal links between two time-series of any kind. Thus, it carries the potential to establish a wide-range of still unknown temporal links between two cognitive processes (and their modulating factors) across all domains of the field.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - 38789261
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:001257817300004
DO  - DOI:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1798-23.2024
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1027012
ER  -