Study on the effect of nontarget types on name based auditory event-related potentials

Exploring the brain response to stimuli of healthy people in passive state is helpful to understand the brain response mechanism of unresponsive people. Event-related potential (ERP) can reflect the time synchronization of potentials, which is a feasible objective electrophysiological index reflecting the functional status of the brain. In this paper, we used the subjects' own name (SON) as target stimuli and compared with the nontarget stimuli (others' name) of Three Chinese Characters (3CC) and Two Chinese Characters (2CC) with the same stimuli duration (600ms) and inter stimuli interval (500ms-800ms). Thirteen healthy subjects attended in this study with four conditions ( [active, passive]×[3CC, 2CC] ). We compared the ERP waveforms, the behavior performance, and the classification of four different conditions. ERP results show that the P300 amplitude of conditions with 3CC nontargets is higher than that of conditions with 2CC nontargets. Behavioral results show that the grand accuracy is 97% when the nontargets are 3CC, while the grand accuracy is only 94% when the nontargets are 2CC. The reaction time is also different from the two nontargets (605ms with 3CC vs 635ms with 2CC). Classification results illustrate that in active condition, the accuracy rate is 82.1% when the nontarget is 3CC, and that is 80.9% in passive condition, which are 4.2% and 6.4% higher than the accuracy rate under 2CC cases in both active and passive conditions. This study can provide a scheme for grading diagnosis of consciousness detection, and further applying to clinical evaluation.Clinical Relevance- This study can provide a better paradigm basis for clinical evaluation of unresponsive patients (such as disorder of consciousness, DOC) and may become an effective auxiliary means for clinical rating scales.