Evaluating Electrophysiological Responses due to Identity Judgments

This study was conducted to explore how the brain processes decisions about identity, employing event-related potentials (ERPs) as a measure. The aim was to ascertain if the EEG/ERP technique could be used to monitor the cognitive processing of identity judgments as they happen. The investigation focused on comparing two groups of statements: those that used the concept of ‘same’ and those that used ‘different’. The researchers hypothesized that there would be notable differences in the ERPs, particularly around the 400 -millisecond mark, correlating with the reaction time disparities observed behaviorally. The ERP data revealed that the ‘different’ statements generated a unique N 400 response when contrasted with the ‘same’ statements, implying that the participants’ cognitive responses to these two types of judgments were not the same.