Neurophysiological Basis of Microgenesis Theory: Stages of Visual Information Flow as Reflected in Functionally Defined Components of Event Related Potentials in Man

This is a first study that experimentally tested the basic premise of microgenetic theory: existence of recurrent stages of information processing in the brain. The application of Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to a substantial number of individual multi-channel ERPs in two variants of the cued GO/NOGO task enabled us to decompose the sensory-related ERP waves into four functionally distinct components. In the first variant of the cued GO/NOGO task images of plants were compared with images of animals (AnimalAnimal pairs corresponded to GO trails, whereas Animal-Plant pairs corresponded to NOGO trials), in the second variant faces of the same person with different emotional expressions were compared. According to sLORETA the extracted components were generated in the occipital, left and right temporal and right parietal cortical areas. Each of the components was characterized by two sequential activation patterns in the GO condition. Each activation pattern included a positive fluctuation followed by a negative fluctuation. In the NOGO condition an additional mismatch positivity followed the GO-like positive fluctuation. At the early stage (around 160 ms after stimulus) the mismatch positivity at the left temporal component was associated with the hypothetical operation of comparing the physical features of the stimuli with working memory. At the late stage (around 260 ms) the mismatch positivity at the left temporal component was associated with the operation of comparing semantic features of the stimuli with working memory.